“Hey, stay on your own side of the bed!”

“It’s cool, Bro,” I responded to Panda’s somewhat irritable request. “Mom said it’s okay for us to be together. We just can’t go outside, that’s all.”Panda eyed me cautiously. “Well we don’t go outside anyway,” he responded. “But I heard we were supposed to be social distancing.”“Dude, trust me on this,” I said in my most authoritative and calming voice. “Mom’s the one who is social distancing, not us. It’s only for humans. Would I lie to you?”Panda mumbled something I could’t quite understand, so I continued. “Haven’t you noticed Mom has been home all the time lately? She hasn’t even gone out to the thrift stores or the craft stores for like three weeks.”“Good thing for her you can get mosaic tiles online!”“And surely you’ve noticed how much time she’s been spending in her recliner, working on her blog or doing jigsaw puzzles on her iPad?”Panda nodded in recognition. “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” he agreed. “So is that why she has all these projects going, like shredding stuff and trying to clean up the sewing room?”“Yep,” I replied. “But the thing is, as soon as she decides to do something, like clean off her desk, she gets sidetracked taking pictures of me. See how pretty the sunlight looks on my fur?”Panda laughed. “Then the other day she actually decided to cook,” he said. “That’s something we don’t see too often!”“Seriously!” I agreed. “I knew I’d better supervise that one.” Panda nodded. “But those chicken tostadas looked pretty good to me,” was his reply.I had to agree with him on that one. “Plus lately I have to stare at her in the morning to let her know it’s time to get up,” I remarked. “Even though she’s retired, she still used to get up earlier than she does now.” “That’s true,” Panda concurred. “At least you’ve been helping her organize the desk drawers. And she did finally finish the sea animals mosaic!”“Yeah,” I replied with a sigh of relief. “I’m glad that project is finally over with!” “I notice she’s been making coffee a lot, too,” Panda added. “Now that she has her new Keurig that matches the kitchen. Hey, is that us on that coffee cup?”“Oh that’s right,” I said. “Didn’t you know? She made it on Zazzle  with a picture from when we flew that plane out of Area 51. As a matter of fact, it’s available online in her Zazzle store!” Panda was impressed. “Wow, that makes us kind of famous, doesn’t it?” “I guess it does,” I replied as we jumped up onto our chair in the front living room. “But being famous doesn’t keep us from being bored. Let’s do something fun.”For awhile we played “Roll the Ball”, but we soon tired of the activity and adjourned to the sewing room.“Dude, you spilled Mom’s buttons!” Panda exclaimed as he caught up with me. “What’s out there anyway?”“It’s a squirrel,”  I replied. “Can you see him? He’s up in the persimmon tree!” Panda sniffed.”Aww, that’s nothing,” he said. “If you’ve seen one squirrel, you’ve seen ’em all.”“And I suppose you’ve seen a lot of squirrels in your life?” I asked, feeling just a tiny bit miffed as jumped into my favorite wastepaper basket.But Panda was undeterred. “Let’s play tackle!” he called out as he jumped in with me. “Hah! I got you!”  I struggled to get him off me. “You’re squishing me, Bro,” I protested. “Get out of the basket!”“Okay, okay,” Panda responded, jumping out. “Well that was fun. What shall we do next?” “Let’s go look out the front window,” I suggested. Panda jumped up on the windowsill beside me. “Aw man, it’s raining,” he said, sounding disappointed. Then we looked at each other, and we both laughed. “We can’t go anywhere anyway,” I said, “and neither can Mom. So I guess the rain isn’t so bad after all.”  Suddenly Panda pointed in the direction of the street.“A rainbow!” we exclaimed in unison. We called Mom over and she took a picture with her phone, assuring us it was okay for her to step out onto the front porch just for a minute.