The clatter came from the dining room at ten past six on the first Saturday in June: a light wooden rattle, a soft scrape, then quiet. I knew before I got there that it was Mabel, because nothing else in our house is awake at that hour and also small enough to fit on a windowsill.
She was sitting on the dining room sill, perfectly still, staring at open air. A grackle at the feeder had apparently been too much to bear, and she'd put both front paws into the bottom corner of the screen. The old mesh tore loose from its wooden frame along the bottom edge and swung outward like a pet door.
To her enormous credit, she didn't go through it. She looked at the gap, she looked at me, and she stayed exactly where she was, which I choose to believe was good judgment and not shock. I scooped her up, shut the window and sat on the dining room floor for a minute with my heart going. Mabel has been inside for all nine years of her life, and that's the plan for the rest of it.
Why that window
Our living room windows have aluminum combination storms on the outside, with sturdy built-in screens. The dining room is different. Those windows still have old-style wooden screens: separate wooden frames with mesh stapled in under thin strips of trim, set into the outside of the window opening. They're charming, and they're about as old as everything else in this house. The staples along the bottom had rusted, the mesh had gone brittle, and the two little turn buttons holding the frame had loosened over the years.
It's also the window Mabel cares about most, because the bird feeder hangs right outside it. In June, with the windows open and the birds busy, she's on that sill for hours.
What we considered
- Keeping the windows shut. Not realistic. We don't have central air, the window units are in other rooms, and the dining room needs a cross-breeze in summer.
- Opening only the top sash. That's what a lot of cat people do with double-hung windows. Our top sashes were painted shut sometime around 1970 and seem to like it that way.
- Clip-in window guards. We looked at a few. They're bulky, and they block the view, which is the whole reason she sits there.
- Fixing the screens properly. The one we went with.
The fix, and what it cost
Caleb took both dining room screens down that same Saturday and laid them across two sawhorses in the garage. He pried off the trim strips, pulled the old staples and the brittle mesh, and put in pet-resistant screen, a heavier vinyl-coated mesh that's thicker and stiffer than the standard kind and made to stand up to claws. He stretched it tight, stapled it every couple of inches and tacked the trim back on with new brads.
The second part was the retrofit clips: small metal tabs around the edges of each opening that hold the screen frame snug, so it can't be shoved outward even if the mesh holds and the cat decides to lean on the whole thing. That was the part I cared about most, since the frame was the real weak spot. When both screens were back in, Caleb leaned on each one with the flat of his hand, a lot harder than any cat could, and neither one budged.
The total came to $68:
- A roll of pet-resistant screen, enough for both windows with some left over: about $38
- A pack of retrofit clips: about $19
- Staples and brads: about $11
Mabel supervised the whole job from a dining room chair, sitting very upright, the way she does when she believes something is being done on her behalf. I logged the $68 as a pet expense, since there was never any question who it was for.
The tradeoff is the view. The pet-resistant mesh is darker than the old stuff, so the feeder looks like it's behind a pair of sunglasses, and the dining room is a shade dimmer on cloudy days. Mabel doesn't seem to mind. On Tuesday morning I watched her press one paw flat against the new screen, push, wait and push again. Nothing moved. She sat down and went back to the grackles.
