Happy birthday to The Kittens!
So once upon a long ago my daughter had this kitten we got from a girl in my brother’s office whose cat had just had kittens, name of Fearless. As she grew, she of course came into heat for the first time (Fearless, not Madeleine), got herself knocked up straightaway after escaping from strict-but-not-strict-enough quarantine, had her own litter of wee bairns, and successfully brought them to just past the weaning phase.
Then came the terrible, terrible day Fearless escaped from the house as I was leaving for work and immediately ducked under brack’s Mustang, where I couldn’t possibly retrieve her. After several minutes on hands and knees trying to coax her out verbally, I gave up and went on to work, thinking she’d do what she always did when she managed to dart out the door between my legs, which by then she’d gotten pretty good at: climb up on the roof and lie up there in the sun waiting me for to get back, whereupon I would call for her and she would carefully make her way down to the gutter pipe, then leap into my waiting arms to be carried back inside.
Alas, that was not to be on this black, bleak day. Little did I know as I left that it would be the last time I would ever see or speak to Fearless; most likely, she got nabbed by the coyotes with which the area was and is rife, the poor, doomed little thing. I can hardly bear to even think about what an awful fate that would have been for her, it just breaks my heart.
But she did leave behind a wonderful legacy, in the form of the kittens she had given birth to almost exactly nine weeks before. The runt of the five, a sweet grey tabby, was adopted by brack’s sister, where she remains all fat and happy to this day. After weeks of unsuccessfully trying to find good homes for all but two of the others (my original plan had been to keep two of ‘em anyway, at Madeleine’s behest), I finally had to admit defeat and just keep all four of the little critters myself. After getting to know them, no way could I have carted them off to the animal shelter, where they would almost certainly be euthanized in short order. Might as well just shoot me in the head and be done with it, instead.
And it’s all worked out wonderfully in the end, both for them and for me. In fact, I really don’t know what I’d do without my beloved feline companions, I’d be lost without them. During my dreadful ordeal in hospital last year, I worried frantically about the small cohort of four-legged chums which will forevermore be known to Madeleine and me as simply The Kittens, knowing that they would be traumatized by my sudden disappearance from among them.
Now, my then-roomie and lifelong friend brack being a cat-lover of long standing his own self, bless his big, generous heart, I knew he would feed and care for them, no problem. Which was a great comfort to me, the only comfort I had at the time. Even so, for their entire lives I had been Daddy to them, then one day all of a sudden Daddy was gone and didn’t look like ever coming back. How could they NOT be bothered by such a grievous loss? I mean, seriously now, who wouldn’t be?
But in the end all was copacetic, we all got through it and came out the other side okay. The Kittens were born on Easter Sunday four years ago, so in celebration of the auspicious occasion I thought I’d run some pics of them here.
NOTE: The rest of this post I’ll tuck below the fold so as not to slow down main-page loading for those not interested in looking at purty pitchers of incredibly cute aynimules.
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