Tag: #poet

AKA The Crazy Cat

Chapter 3

   I didn’t want to become the “Cat Lady” of my new neighborhood. I had gotten off on the wrong foot, on day one, with an off-balance dope fiend who lived directly across the street from me. While attempting to acclimate my kitties to their new home, they had escaped the trailer, bounding joyfully through the neighborhood at 100 miles an hour.

  Oliver was a long and lanky boy of dubious Russian Blue heritage. Beautifully Grey and a little odd, he would saunter up to just about anyone. Frenchy was a lovely Calico of the clouded kind, petite, demure and a veritable hellcat when she was cornered. And then there was Fogerty…

   Fogerty deserves his own paragraph. He was a descendent of the Banyan Drive rescue crew, one of the kittens my Mom had meticulously documented in her “Book of Cats on Banyan Drive”. He was born in 1997 , brother to Munson , son of Teddy. He was very old when we arrived in Tampa. But very spry. To the point that the local Vet argued that there was no possible way he was 20 years old, even if I did have documentation.  I gave up trying to persuade him.

   So these were my three cats at my new home. Mine, in the sense that I inherited them. I promised Mom on her deathbed that I would care for her cats after she died. And I was keeping my promise. I was not capable of loving them properly at that time. My heart was too fragile to let any love in. So I fed them, watered them, and talked to them. I watched them settle in, watched them play. Even let one sit on me, now and then.

   But they weren’t allowed in my bedroom, no, that was sacred Shih Tzu territory:

    My pets, my dogs, my loves.