More about the Cat

This cat was what my partner called a “money cat”, a tricolored tortoishell. She immediately took to my partner who was at times — well the only word I can use is ga-ga about her. We bought her dried cat food but when he discovered she liked a certain brand of tuna, he used to buy it to give her a tuna treat once a day.

The weather in winter gets very cold in Vermont and so he put out a high-sided box on the balcony for her to sleep in if she came home when we were in bed, and on nights when the temperature was below zero, she slept on our bed and he got up at 2 am when she demanded to be let out.

In the beginning, she wasn’t too fond of me {perhaps because I kept scooping her up when she walked past me} but she soon discovered that my partner made wonderful “cat furniture.” She would sit for hours on his knees while he rubbed her ears and she purred blissfully. Before she disappeared she had even accepted me enough to lie on me when I was on the bed and to occasionally jump on my knee while I was here at the keyboard…but only if her favorite cat furniture wasn’t around.

Since she was definitely an outdoor cat, we told ourselves that we had accepted the fact that she might not come back one day, but when it happened, it is, we are finding, a VERY hard thing to accept. I still look out of the door to the balcony every morning hoping to see her in her sleeping box {“We’ve got a boxed cat,” we would tell each other.} When I go downstairs to get the paper, I still wait for a lull in the traffic and call “kittykittykitty” and hope to see her darting across the street to me. Yesterday at the restaurant, my partner said, “The best birthday present I could get would be to see that cat waiting on the doorstep {as she often did when we went out} for us to let her in…”

This is the third week she has been gone…