Garage Scene and Beyond with Gray.

I don't know who invented the concept of a garage, but I recall, growing up in Elgin, our one car garage was also a place where Dad had paints and yard tools.  Unfortunately, it was also a place where I often was "paddled" (with a paint stick) for talking back through adolescence.  Maybe that's way, for most of my adult life, a garage has been a space I just move in and out of.  It's functional for the car, storing file boxes of papers from different chapters of our lives and "stuff" that is seasonal (fake Christmas tree, our son's old snowboard and his box of Transformer toys).  It holds our bikes and Mark's motorcyle. 

We used to have room for one car, but, now with Gray in our lives, we are adjusting to life with an outside cat who needs warmth when the temps drop below 45 degrees as they did last weekend and early this week.  So, we moved his bed inside, placing a thick towel underneath it, and brought in one of the front patio chairs so we could take turns in the garage with Gray. The car stays in the driveway so that Gray can roam around.  He has yet, to our knowledge, used the litter box.  So far, he seems to just shut down after his last meal and mew and snooze until dawn.

When it's my turn to be with him (we are overly conscious about tending to him, I suppose, because we don't want him to think he's been abandoned again, as he was by his first family), I bring out my Nook and read.  For the past six weeks, I have been savoring Tolstoy's Anna Karenina which took me to Russia and lyrical scenes of harvest, the Petersburg Opera, death (not only Anna's), birth (Kitty's baby) and a main character's (who is suposedly Tolstoy) discovery of God.  All that, with our cat, in the garage.