Cat study

Let the cat out this morning.

She peers as me, trying to figure out what I am. I reach out and cup her small head in my hand, stroke her back, all the way to her tail, surprised at the softness, and guess that my daughter took a brush to her the night before. She begins to purr.

She's wobbly on her feet, back legs collapsing with every step. Still, she twitches her tail and wanders off around the corner of the house, looking for something interesting to play with. Which is funny, considering that she's probably completely blind.

She's a study for all old people on the verge of death. A while ago I started buying canned cat food on the advice of the veterinarian. He thought she'd appreciate having something soft to eat. Then I made the mistake of changing the brand of soft food on her and she up and quit eating all together. For a couple of days she dwindled, until I figured it out. She wasn't sick, she just didn't recognize the other stuff as food, or at least, it wasn't HER food. So I replaced the new stuff with the old stuff and she went right back to lapping it up, as though she was starving, which, of course, she was.

I felt bad afterwards, that it took me so long to notice.

We've had her with us for a long, long time. Now and again we amuse ourselves trying to decide how old she is. 20? 22? 25? Old, anyway. She was around before the kids, I know this, because I remember being very sensitive to the smell of the cat food I used to have to feed them. This was before she was an only cat and one of two. The other cat, Nancy, caught some infection from her cheap cat food and thereafter, they both had to go on an expensive cat food diet, which used to give me nausea when I was pregnant. I couldn't even have the cats in the same room with me because the smell of the cat food permeated their whole bodies. I remember chasing them out of the living room. Eventually they learned to avoid me.

After I had my daughter it wasn't so bad, but by then I had other responsibilities and so there was no time for playing with cats anyway.

Now I only have the one cat left and she's not long for this world. Of course, we've written her off a few times before this and she always comes back. Once, shortly after we'd moved here she disappeared out the back door and didn't come home for days. I thought she'd been killed for sure, by an owl maybe or hit by a car. I thought someone else had taken her into their home. That was what I told the kids.

The day that I decided to clean up the litterbox for the last time and dump it in the trash was the day that she wandered back home, none the worse for her adventure. Then I knew what had happened. She'd stayed with someone else, but they didn't know the trick of living with her and could only put up with her midnight howling for a few days before they turned the gift cat loose again. She came home and we went back to our routine of buying her wet food ("How many days do you think she'll live? 6 cans? 8 cans?") and scooping her box and locking her in the back room before retiring so that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, howling because she can't remember where she is, we don't hear her at all.