It's not every day I get mistaken for a bucket.

This has been a bizarre week. I'm wondering if maybe I've been secretly teleported to Twin Peaks.

This week, I have mistakenly called my mother a cat, have momentarily thought Gypsy had somehow returned from the dead, and have been mistaken for a bucket.

I've been mistaken for a Biblical figure slain by David in the past. Even a female seventies sitcom character, but until this week, I've never been mistaken for a bucket.

First, when Patches, the cat who identifies mostly with my mother, jumped on my lap and demanded to be petted, I screwed up the syntax in my mild questioning of her. "What are you doing on me?" I asked, "Granny's your cat." It was bad enough that I said it, but my mother heard me and insisted she was not Patches' cat.

One cool and misty morning before dawn, I saw Gypsy, my fuzzy little brown cat who has been dead for months now, walking up the sidewalk toward me. It's funny what your mind will let you believe, even momentarily, when you want it to be so. I turned on my porch light and sat in the rocking chair on it. 'Gypsy' jumped up on my lap. It was the right weight, the right hair texture, the right disposition. But it wasn't Gypsy. This one's fur was darker, and if I inspected it closely enough, I probably would have found it was a tomcat, judging from the proportion of it's head to the rest of it's body. If he had stayed around, I was going to name him Lazarus, but by nightfall he was gone.

That morning, as I sat in the rocking chair, I was wearing a red shirt. I heard my mother rustling about in the living room, looking out the porch window. When I went back in the house, she asked me where I'd been. I said I had been sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. She said she had looked out there but hadn't seen me. I was confused because the rocking chair sits right in front of the window.

We have this red laundry tub/bucket that functions as a laundry basket when we hang clothes on the solar-powered clothes dryer on the front porch. When not in use, it sits in one of the two chairs on the front porch. This day, it was in the non-rocking chair.

"I saw something red out the window, but I thought it was the laundry bucket," she told me.

"I am not a bucket," I informed her.

It's not every day that one gets mistaken for a bucket.