Virginia
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 Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2006 7:37 am Post subject: Moments with our cats |
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I've had dogs and cats almost all my life, but stopped having cats when I moved out of my parent's house - the cat litter bothers my asthma. But the first cat I ever had was one I only barely remember, Georgia. Then we got Howard, who used to sleep with my sister, my dad always maintained that cat looked like Howard Hughes Then our final kitty was Balthazar and her daughter Tyler, although poor Tyler didn't make it a year with us, and Balthazar made it to age ten, long after Tyler's demise.
Most of our cats were indoor/outdoor cats, and some of them were serious wanderers. Even Balthazar was a wanderer - she probably had the best self-preservation instincts, though, because she knew to come home when hurt, and never tangled with cars. I remember coming home for Spring break from college, and my mother hadn't seen Balthazar for almost two weeks by that point.
So of course, I did a bit of a look see around the area, but figured it was pointless. It wasn't - three days later, she found me outside, and followed me into the house. I thought she was just hungry so I fed her, but when I walked upstairs to my bedroom, she followed me up, and then wanted on my lap, an unusual thing for her, and that was when I saw she'd been injured.
She'd been stabbed in the chest by some cretin, but thankfully they'd stabbed her low in the chest so it was just a skin and muscle injury. Needless to say, we got her into the vet immediately!! But she'd been a wanderer ever since we'd gotten her as a kitten, so restricting her movements was pretty much not an option. Keeping her in the house while she healed was tough enough!!
She was a fun kitty, though - she was temperamental, and would go from wanting to be cuddled to wanting to bite you in a moment's notice, so you never quite knew what you were getting into when you'd reach for her. But her and our dog Freckles were good buddies and would "share" my bed with me in the winter - Freckles would sleep by my legs; Balthazar would sleep at my shoulder. Mind you, it was never my choice that I'd be sharing the bed with them - it was just when they decided that it was cold enough to shove me over and make me share the bed with them. If I asked them to get on the bed, I'd have been calling both animals for hours and never gotten a single paw up on the bed, but if I ignored them, I'd end up with both of them snuggled in.
And it never failed - if one wanted up there, the other HAD to get in there too. Go figure. Balthazar was a fun cat. She liked to kitty-stomp through the house, which was always entertaining, and would sometimes decide to leap out at you just for giggles. One of her kittens, a big kitty named twity that my brother kept at his house, would hop up on a piano that was next to a doorway and would leap up at you as you came through the door, shocking the snot out of you.
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