Xyzyz and Abcaba

In a recent post I told you I had written stories and that some of them were published here on the forum.  I recently wrote another one about my cats.  A lot of cat stuff is published here so here is my contribution.

    XYZYX and ABCBA

During the summer we often left out back door open to fill the house with fresh air.  Then one day in walked a beautiful Russian Blue pussycat.  Apparently she liked us and decided to stay.  We named he Shadow.

She was a friendly cat.  She would sit on our coffee table and purr while Betty and I were watching television in the evenings.  Occasionally she would jump up and sit on our laps.

She looked rather fat to me and I took her to a vet for an examination and discovered she was pregnant.  So now we were going to be owned by more than just Shadow.

One dat Betty came up from the basement and said she heard some ‘squeaking’ down there.  I went down to investigate and on a shelf behind a curtain I found Shadow nursing four kittens.  Another dead one was lying close by.  I took it away and put it in trash bag and then into the garbage container in the car port.

After a few days Shadow brought her kittens upstairs, one by one, and hid them in Betty’s bedroom closet.  She kept moving them from place to place and then one evening she brought each one to the surface of the coffee table and proceeded to nurse them.  She was showing them off to us.

There was a black one and a semi-calico one we kept and we gave the other two away.  The black one named Xyzyx and the calico one we named Abcba.  And every evening while Betty and I were sitting around in the living room Xyzyx and Abcba would cavort around the room and climb up our chairs and sit on our laps as they became acquainted with us and Shadow and her brood became a part of our family.

Xyyz was rather aloof.  While he would lay on the floor near our chairs and occasionally scramble up and sit on our laps he was content just to be in the rom with us.  Abcba, on the other hand, craved attention.  If one of us were in the living room she would leap up on our laps and demand to be petted.

When they were about six months old we had a carpenter come in and install pet doors in the back porch door to the back yard, the french door to the side yard from the livingroom and in the door to the carport.  Then we removed the litter box for good and the kittens and their mom became indoor-outdoor cats.

I took the three of them to the vet to have them neutered.  We decided three cats in a household should be enough.

We had three feeders and three water dishes in the back porch.  I don’t know if they selected their own or if the just went in by themselves from time to time and select one to eat and drink from.  But they became quite independent. 

Later that summer we had another feral cat walk in and decide to stay.  He was a calico and I named him Finnegan.  I don’t know why.  He just seemed Irish to me.  And when it became evident he wasn’t going to go away I took him to the vet and his balls cut off too.

Now we had quite a family of cats.  And we loved them and I think they loved us.  They were all quite affectionate and they had an enormous amount of freedom.  We never knew where any one of them was except in the evening, after dinner, when we were relaxing in the living room.  That was our time together.

There were times when we had some cleanup to do in the porch when one of them would bring in a bird it had caught and there would be a dead bird in the corner of the room and feathers all over the floor.  They were just cats being cats.

The pet doors did have one drawback.  Sometimes racoons would come in and eat the cat food and make a mess.  Once a skunk came in.  I heard some noise in the porch and peeked in and saw it eating out of one of the feeders.  It turned and looked at me and then just kept eating it’s fill.

Once I was on my computer in my office and Betty came in and said, “There’s a racoon in the living room.”  I went in and saw it and managed to shoo it out to the porch and into the back yard.  Such is life in Roswell.

We loved those cats for almost a decade until Betty died.  My daughter came down and sold the house for me and I moved into a retirement home.  But before I left I found a home for each of the cats.  I made a special effort to make sure brother and sister, Xyzyx and Abcba stayed together.  They had never been apart and I think they would have missed each other if separated.

My next door neighbor took Finnegan and whenever I drive to the market to go grocery shopping I would drive by her house.  From time to time I would stop by and visit her and Finnegan.  We would sit on her front porch and sometimes Finnegan would hop up onto my lap.

Unfortunately the big flood last fall flooded her house.  She moved back to Hawaii and I don’t know what happened to Finnegan.

From time to time I think about getting another cat.  But it would have to be sequestered into my little two room apartment here.  I don’t think it would be fair to it.  I think cats have to be free to roam and explore like Shadow, Xyzyx, Abcba and Finnegan were.

If mankind possess souls that go to some Heaven after death I think dogs and cats that love their owners as much as we love them must have souls too.  I can’t imagine a hereafter without them.

 

Noel