An Awful Quiet

On St. Patricks Day our kitty died.  It's terribly quiet in the house.  Not that she was so loud, especially as she grew older and fonder of napping in sunbeams or on soft chairs.  But now that she is gone, I miss her soft vocalizations asking me to hurry up and open the Fancy Feast can, and just forget making coffee, or purring loudly on my lap.  Then there was the sound of her claws on the kitchen floor, and the solid thump when she jumped down off the bed after I clicked off the light. I keep thinking I hear her, but of course I'm mistaken.

When a pet dies, a little part of your heart dies too - even though you know in your head that animals have comparatively short life spans.  Heck, we learn that when we're children through a whole parade of fish, birds, cats, dogs, all lost to accidents, disease, or old age.  If our parents didn't allow pets, there were books and movies to drive the lesson home - Old Yeller and The Yearling come to mind. 

Bucky, aka Cat Girl, Little Buckeroo, was a rescue.  After our previous cat, Sophie, died, we grieved a few weeks, traveled a little, and then went interviewing kitties at the Humane Society.  This particular feline, then probably an adolescent, somewhat small in stature, stood out from the pack by trotting over and hopping up and my lap and making herself at home. Clearly she was the one, a first rate snuggler.  We had eleven years together.

Eleven years aren't so many, really.  Lots of cats live longer.  She, unfortunately, developed a benign tumor on her face several years ago.  The vet prescribed steroids, which helped some, but caused her to develop diabetes.  I wish we had been told this was a possible side effect. We made an executive decision not to treat the disease.  Treating her would have involved much drawing of blood, administering of medicine, and in the end, the same result.  So we opted for lots of cuddles and staying home.

She was so weak at the end I started searching for a vet who would come to our house to put her to sleep, but she took charge of the situation herself, and passed away on her own at home.

I surely miss her.

Porch Cats

I have my computer desktop wallpaper set with an ongoing slideshow of photo references, old family pictures and a myriad of photos I have compulsively taken since I was about eight years old.  An old black and white picture came up today, a crowd of barn cats that my mother used to feed out the back door of the kitchen.  There was a slanty old wooden porch, painted gray, that caught the morning light.  She'd set out aluminum pans of milk and stale bread, and maybe a raw egg, and the cats, who were  rangy and slim from a life spent outdoors hunting for mice and gophers, would tread and cry for an easy treat. Sometimes there were as many as a dozen, though their ranks were regularly thinned by old age and misadventure.  More than once in the winter we'd find a flattened pussy cat who had snuggled up near a warm Holstein, only to have the cow roll over on the little animal.  Sometimes they were hit on the road as well, and while we wept when they died, the females produced replacement kittens regularly.  It was a thrill wait for them to be born, then listen for their high pitched kitten cries. 

I edited several cats out of this sketch.  I wanted to keep it simple, but got all caught up in pattern and trying to show the light and shadow.  Why they all are the same colors, I'm not sure.  At least one should have been a gray tiger, but somehow the calico colors just happened.