You may have noticed that I don’t exactly live in a palace. It’s a one-bedroom in a not-particularly nice part of Brooklyn. It faces onto a “courtyard,” which means our windows look out onto our neighbors’ brick wall. We don’t love it, but it’s cheap, and there’s plenty of room for our cats to roam, and I have learned to distinguish the sounds of people throwing heavy objects out their windows from the noise of gunfire, so it’s been an educational experience.

The one thing we really lack is light. We’re on the third floor on a block (“courtyard”) of six-story buildings, and there are some trees between the buildings, so not a ton of vitamin D filters down our way. I don’t mind that much. We live very close to a big park, and I get out a lot. The main problem that we cannot grow plants. At all. Here’s a wee tomato I once managed to coax out of the soil in a planter by the window, and I considered this a major victory. I could almost garnish a salad.

Transition.

Hey, do you know what Jezebel’s favorite food is?

That’s right. Plants. Which means that even when I manage to get one to survive on big hopes and good wishes and Miracle-Gro, she still somehow finds a way to destroy it.

When we first got the little jerks, we had this wonderful hanging plant with long, gorgeous tendrils. Jezebel thought it was SO fun to swipe at those tendrils. She was still so new and so little and so cute I didn’t have the heart take swift action to stop it. That was a huge mistake. She took off a couple of leaves a day. She killed that one within weeks.

Then we tried to grow herbs. Oh man. There is nothing more fun than herbs. She couldn’t stop biting them, and swatting at them, and doing whatever she could to uproot them. Adios, basil.

And cut flowers? Jezebel can’t get enough.

When we bring some home, she has to get up on the table to check them out. And then they smell so good, she just needs to sniff them. Just a little bit. And then, oh man, if they smell that good, they must taste amazing! So she bites them. Just to check. And then, they taste so good…

These ended up with tiny little teethmarks all up and down them.

A while back, we tried to grow regular-sized (as opposed to wee) tomatoes on the fire escape. Those were done in by a rabid squirrel (seriously) who decided a tomato plant pot was the perfect place to build a nest. This is technically not the fault of my cats, who are indoor cats and utterly defenseless in the wilderness, and therefore couldn’t possibly have done anything to stop the squirrel. But they did love to sit in the windowsill and watch the squirrel and growl at him through the glass, which I can only imagine must have encouraged the ratty little thing. So that’s on them too.

We have two tiny little plants left.

These things are basically unkillable. Trust me, she’s tried. The other day I came home to find dirt all over the kitchen floor. She’d been digging in my pots. I don’t know what she was looking for, but I hope she found it.

If she were any other cat, I might perhaps see this unfortunate interest in botany as a sign of intelligence and broad intellectual interests. But seriously. I know better. She’s a jerk. When she finds something that makes me happy, she simply has to destroy it.