Saturday, May 31, 2014

Lost Cat, May 2014

She's gone. She was my mother's cat, born in her house, slept on her bed. She was beautiful. And before anyone else moved in here, she used to sit on my shoulders.* She was  the mother of my darling "kittens" (3 years old now, still act like kittens).

She was probably gotten by a wild animal the first night.** It rained. She might have tried to come back in through the hole in the screen where I had left the door open for her, and gotten chased off by the Horrible Roomer's cat or dogs. She wasn't very old, maybe 1 or 2 in 2010, so 6 now, or less.

A disadvantage of indoor cats is that they may not really learn to come when I call. She hadn't. (My outdoor cats came running when I called them.) So when they're hiding out or lost, I don't have that second chance for them to find their way back, to my calling. I called. I looked.

She liked being out on this screen porch, she and her friend Sugar Mouse, that first summer, before they had kittens. (My mother's cats had not been fixed nor had shots.) She was a good mother, protecting her kittens from their father and everything else. Once a kitten made a squeak when I was near it, and she flew at me to protect it.

When she got frightened, she and Mousie, her companion, they used to squeeze into the little drawers on either side of the kitchen sink. She was frightened by someone just before she vanished, and hiding in there. And I took a picture of her. With a flash. She maybe thought it wasn't a safe hiding place anymore.


**Dogs and cars kill more cats here, though.

*This last year and a half it has been too unpleasant here for me to sit with her at all, in this part of the house, with the Roomer here. I really missed that, her sitting on my shoulders. I'm afraid she missed it too.


I learned later that the low-life slime who lived here, guest of a renter, the one who had kicked out the screen in the kitchen door, had deliberately chased Patches out to die. 
I learned it when he tried to do it to her companion Mousie too. But Mousie was too smart for him; she hid where he couldn't find her. And I locked him out forever. (They were already supposed to have moved out.)

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