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A

t the urging of Sars, I'm going to tell you about the Jones family.

In my new neighborhood, there are a lot of outdoor cats. Outdoor cats, in my experience, don't tend to stick to their own yards. They run around and go wherever they want. Property lines mean nothing to cats.

As a result, we often have strange cats in our back yard, or even sometimes in our front yard, hanging out by the bird feeders or skulking around in the deep grass next door. I don't know what their actual names are, and in some cases I'm not entirely sure which house they belong to. So I just assumed that they are all related. Because they're all cats, and they all have the same type of longish fur and the same general body type. I don't think they are siblings. They must be cousins. And they all have the last name Jones.

The first Jones I met was Marmalade Jones. He is orange. He has turned out to be a rare visitor to these parts. Marmalade likes to sit out in the back yard and say, "My name is Mar-ma-lade. Mar-ma-lade Jones!" Marmalade talks like a seventy-five-year old man from Alabama. And he likes to say his own name a lot. He's a little hard of hearing, so he talks kind of loudly. Sometimes right when you are in the middle of a sentence, he will just shout out, "I'm Mar-ma-LADE! Mar-ma-LADE JONES!" He doesn't care. He's Marmalade Jones.

The next Jones I met was Gorilla Jones. He is all black and very muscular, somewhat like a gorilla. It helps if you know that I tend to refer to my own cats as monkeys, so it wasn't a big leap to Gorilla. Anyway. Gorilla Jones loves my cats. Loves them. He likes to sit under the bay window in the front of our house and wait for one of my girls to come to the window, and then he sings to them. And then they run away. Gorilla doesn't know why the girls keep running away from him when he sings so pretty. Gorilla also likes to hang out under my car, but if I walk out of the house, he runs home. He lives across the street, but he always looks both ways before crossing. He wishes he could come and live with me and my girls, because his family has dogs, and he doesn't like dogs.

The next Jones I met is an elusive Jones. I think I've only seen him twice. His name is Smokey Jones, and as you might have guessed, he is gray. I don't know much about Smokey's lifestyle or personality since, as mentioned, I haven't had much exposure to him. But Gorilla Jones gave me some information. Smokey likes to lie in the cool grass when it's hot. Smokey doesn't like other cats. Smokey is the youngest Jones. That's about all I know about the mysterious Smokey.

I thought that was all the Joneses that existed until a few weeks ago, when I was introduced to the final Jones family member -- Cracker-Ass Jones. He is all white. Cracker-Ass has a large sense of entitlement. He likes to hop over our privacy fence and hang out in the tree in our yard, next to the bird feeder. Cracker-Ass is a graceful leaper. He can jump up on top of our six-foot high fence without breaking stride. Cracker-Ass is very proud of his long white fur, and always looks clean, even though he spends a lot of time outside. Cracker-Ass Jones doesn't really like people, but he might like you if you helped him catch a bird. He likes to watch the birds and some day he might catch one. Just you wait and see. Just because he hasn't yet doesn't mean that he won't.

So that's the Jones family. Jim thinks I'm insane because I talk about them all the time. Well, not all the time. Just when I see one of them. And then I make up backstories about them and their personalities. I've tried to get pictures of the various Jones family members to no avail. But I will let you know if I find out any more information about them. Maybe I could write a children's book about the Jones family. Except I would probably want to rethink Cracker-Ass.