That Time I Had a Cat

I do not have indoor pets. When I was young we had indoor dogs sometimes (mostly poodles), and I stayed sick and we never equated it with the dog, but it was the dog.

We never had cats, though. My father did not like cats.

I am not especially fond of them, mostly because I haven't been around them and because they make me sneeze. They also seem to know I don't want them near me - if I enter a house with a cat it makes a beeline for me, wanting to purr all over me and get hair on my pants.

I don't dislike cats, really, but I don't pick them up and pet them, either.

But for a little while, I had a cat. Or the cat had me.

We had been married around three months and were living in a cold four-room house when the little kitty showed up at our doorstep. My husband said, "Don't feed it," and of course I did. How could I not? I don't recall what I named her, but she was white with black on her.

My memories of her are few. Once, she helped my husband kill a snake he was trying to pull out from beneath the house we were renting. She bit the snake in the back. The snake immediately relaxed so my husband was able to pull the snake on out of its hole.

The other memory of her is that she had kittens. This surprised me because I didn't think she was old enough to have kittens, but there they were all the same. Unfortunately, she had them in the cellar way up under the house where I couldn't reach them. I heard them, though, the morning they were born, just before I left for work.

I assumed all would be well, but apparently this little mother had no milk, or else was too young to know how to nurse them. She tried to feed them by killing a bird and dragging it to the little mewling babies (at least, I know they were mewling there for a time because I heard them), but of course they couldn't eat a bird. Over the course of a day, the babies were born and they died and I was at work and didn't figure it all out until I came home and went to check on them.

I cried when I saw the dead bird and the little dead kittens.

My husband, of course, was at the fire station for the evening, so I called my brother and asked him to come by and help me with the dead animals under my house.

I am not sure what happened to the cat. We moved and we took the cat with us, but she ran off, never to be seen again.

And that's my only experience with cats.