Kittens: Part 3

Surprise! There is another segment to my “Kittens” story and I promise this one has a better ending.

We put Storm down about a month ago, and that day we poured hot water on the snow and dug through the permafrost ground to make a small grave for him in the back yard. Shadow spent some time looking around the house, searching the empty cat carrying and trying to sniff out his friend. After a couple days he abandoned his search and found himself a spot on a shelf to sleep the day away.

We knew we wanted to get Shadow a new friend but we weren’t sure how long we were supposed to wait… how long do you grieve for a cat? How long do cats grieve? How soon is too soon to get a new one? Why does it feel like I’m replacing Storm? How do we know they will even be friends? All of these questions were going through my head, but Jim assured me it was the right thing to do.

About a week after we buried Storm, we went to the shelter and told them our story, hoping they would be able to help us somehow.  They agreed to give us a new kitten for free, but at the time there were no kittens available for adoption.  Apparently there is a “kitten season” at adoption shelters, and this wasn’t it. They promised they’d contact us when new kittens arrived, so we went home and waited patiently. Meanwhile, Shadow was starting to show symptoms of only child syndrome. We bought him some solo-play toys, but he preferred to follow me everywhere, and meow (very loudly) when he was bored or lonely, often at six o’clock in the morning.

Shadow also started sleeping extremely close to my face

February came with more snow but no contact from the shelter. Jim and I were out running errands one morning and stopped for lunch at a restaurant down the street from the shelter. After lunch, Jim suggested that we stop in and see what’s happening, maybe they had heard some chatter about a new shipment of kittens.

When we arrived, I snuck into the cat room and saw a little kitten in the first crate, but there was a sign on the crate saying someone was interested in him, so I moved down the line. I started playing with another little kitten but before long a volunteer came by and told me that one had already been adopted and was getting picked up later that day. I continued to look around and saw another kitten with a “someone’s interested in me” sign. At this point, I was a little irritated. We never been contacted, but here were all these kittens—that we should have had first dibs on—that had already been adopted. I found a few other kittens, one a tuxedo cat that I wasn’t too fond of, and another that was so shy she wouldn’t play with a toy through the crate.

Jim found me around then and I gave him a look to indicate that I was furious. At least five kittens had come in while we were at home twiddling our thumbs waiting for an email. Shadow was bored out of his mind and driving us crazy, and nobody had bothered to contact us. We went to the lobby and Jim talked to the staff because I was afraid I would yell at someone. They apologized profusely and I calmed down why I remembered how many office-space communication errors I had seen or been involved in.

They had three kittens still available for adoption, the tuxedo, the shy kitten, and a calico kitten. We went back into the cat room, and the woman who worked there told us about the calico kitten, picked him up and let me hold him for a bit. During this time, there was a young woman sitting there, obviously interested in the cat. The employee explained to us that the woman was interested in the kitten, but basically, they weren’t going to give the cat to the woman because she said she would be moving to a new house soon. She told us all of this in front of the woman, while I was holding the cat that she had obviously already grown attached to. At one point, the young woman tried to explain that she wasn’t moving for another few months, but to her that seemed “soon.” It got a little heated for a minute, all the while I was holding this kitten that all the controversy was about.  We said we’d have to think about it, but Jim was more interested in the shy tabby kitten. Jim followed the employee back to the lobby, and I put down the calico and told the woman I really had zero interest in stealing her cat.

Back in the lobby they told us about the shy tabby. A few days before they had tried to take her out of the crate so someone could play with her, and she was so skittish that she had ran under a file cabinet and the couldn’t get her out for hours. Finally, they had to take out the bottom drawer from the file cabinet and pick her up out from above. We said we would think about it and they gave us a letter from the former foster parent and we were on our way.

Jim read the letter to me as we drove home. It said that although she was very shy, once she got used to a new home, this kitten was very playful. In her foster home she had played with the other kittens, even though she was skittish around humans. Jim had already had his mind set on taking her home, and the fact that she was playful with other kittens made the decision for us. We agreed that we’d give her a couple more days to get used to humans in the shelter, and then we’d go back for her.

That weekend the power went out and we had a fire going for hours just to make sure the pipes didn’t freeze. Why not get out of the house for a bit? We headed back out to the shelter and got to know our new kitten. The shelter put her in a fluffy swaddle type bag so we could hold her without her running away. We pet her for a little while, just long enough to confirm we were going to fall in love with her. Jim did the paperwork while I did some cuddling, and then Jim got to cuddle on the drive home while we brainstormed some new names.

One day and 200 possible names later, we had electricity, a name, and a decent picture. Our newest member of the family, Sequoia. 

Molly Adams: An Amazing Woman

These past few weeks have been rough for me. While the world was mourning David Bowie and Alan Rickman, I was making plans to put my kitten down.  At the same time, I learned that one of the most amazing people I have ever known past away. Molly Adams, 91 of Wayland Massachusetts passed away on January 14th.  This woman was as close as a grandparent to me, and I was lucky enough to interview her for a class a few years back.  Here is a piece I wrote about her and her life, that I hope will serve as my memorial to her.

Mrs. Mary Adams—“Please, call me Molly”—welcomes me into her small cozy home in Wayland Massachusetts on the Saturday after thanksgiving.  I step up into the house and follow her to the living room, the walls scattered with pictures of her family and friends.

“So, what do you want to know?” she asks me as we sit down on her living room couch. 

“Everything,” I reply.

“Why do you want to interview me anyway?” She asks with a smile and the snarky attitude of any teenager, “I’m boring.  I haven’t done anything interesting.”  She might not know it, but she’s lying through her teeth.

I explain to her my assignment to write a profile on someone I find interesting.  “I never really got a chance to learn about my grandparents.  And, well, you’re really the closest thing to a grandparent I have,” I explain.  I leave out all of the wonderful stories I’ve heard about her life— “She was a star lacrosse and field hockey player as a teen,” “she lived in Australia for a while,” “She survived breast cancer,” that’s the real reason I’m here. I want to know everything about her. 

Molly Louise Keay was born and raised in the small town of Clifton Heights, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  There, her great grandfather had built a Woolen Mill that made uniforms for soldiers of World War I and II.  The town grew around that mill and her family stayed there.  Molly was the youngest of six children, three boys and three girls who grew up in a three-story Victorian house with their parents, a grandmother and an aunt.  Outside was a barn, where Molly discovered her love of animals.

“The only thing I wanted for my twelfth birthday was a lamb,” she says, then leans in towards me and whispers with excitement, “my mother got me two.”  Along with her lambs, she cared for pet goats, chickens, and ducks.  “And we always had cats and dogs.”  Her living room is decorated with paintings and pictures, wooden carvings and stuffed animals of every species.        “I always wanted to be a vet,” She says, pouting a bit as she recalls her unfulfilled dream. “Nowadays, if you told your parents you wanted to be a vet and they said no—well nowadays they wouldn’t say no,” she cuts herself off as she realizes the differences.  “But if they said no, you would ignore them and become a vet anyways, right?” I nod in agreement and she continues.  “Well back then that didn’t happen.  If your parents told you ‘it’s not proper for a young lady to be a vet,’ that was the end of it.”

She never became the vet she always wanted to be, but she did a whole lot more.  It was no coincidence that Molly met Dwight Adams, the love of her life, on a tour of the United Nations building.  After they were married, they travelled the world together, starting with long road trips across regions of America, then moving on to Europe, Africa, and settling for six months in Australia.  Even with three children, Molly continued to travel, climbing Mount Kenya and Ayer’s rock (before it was banned) with her two daughters, and touring the wildlife of Australia with her daughter Sarah.

“At night we’d sit and sing around this huge bonfire,” she tells me about a five-day wildlife trip in Australia.  Other than Molly and Sarah, everyone was Australian, and two of the men brought their instruments along.  “And the last night, we were next to a river and the moon was out, and they were playing and we were singing and the Kangaroos were walking around.”  She points me to a painting in the corner of the room.  I walk over to see the inside of tree bark, art by the aborigines of Australia.  The white paint against the deep brown bark depicts birds and animals in the rainforest.

But Molly’s life wasn’t always one of luxurious world travel.  She settled for a college closer to home when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and stayed home to care for her. She survived college during World War II, worrying about two of her brothers in the Marines and the Navy and learning to live with food stamps and blacken the windows at night.  Soon after, her sister was diagnosed with polio and taught Molly the importance of caring for other people.

“She was one of those people that you never felt sorry for and she never complained and everybody loved her,” Molly says.  “I asked her one time, I said ‘how can you always be so…up?’  And she said ‘I have to always be up! Because if I’m nasty and disagreeable, nobody’s gonna take care of me.  You can’t be nasty, you’ve got to be nice.” 

“You get out of what you give and because I volunteered in this town, up to my eyeballs, I’ve gotten to know so many people here and I have so many good friends.  I always say that you get more out of it than you give.”

At a young age, Molly took what she learned from her life’s troubles into the world, volunteering at the school, the historical society, the Depot, the polls, and much more. She also volunteered for a family in Wayland, trying a new wave of medicine called “patterning,” where she met my grandmother.  A woman in town had a child who was born with a brain aneurism.  “He couldn’t do anything,” she says, “he couldn’t walk or talk or move.”  After talking to numerous doctors, the mother found a group of doctors willing to help her with a new theory of medicine.  “Three times a day, for three days a week, a team of 5 people would come and help him move in different ways.”  Molly places her feet up on the bench in front of her, showing how the teams would help the boy move his legs to teach him how to walk.

            “The first day that he got up and walked was our day on duty,” she tells me as the joyful memories come to her eyes, “and it was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.”

            After that, she stayed in contact with my grandmother, Janet Owen.  “We became friends as couples,” she said, “playing tennis and bridge and going cross country skiing together.”  Years passed and they stayed friends.  They came to thanksgiving and Christmas dinner when their own family was out of town, touring the world or with the other side of the family.  Dwight passed before I had the chance to know him but Molly continued to visit my grandmother, playing card games and word games like scrabble and boggle. After Gran died, Molly still came to visit, bringing her dogs to play with Granddad’s dogs and my sister and I. When Granddad died in 2009, we begged Molly to sit in the front pew with the family.  After all, she is family, and she knew him better than us grandchildren ever would. 

Before I leave, Molly takes me on a tour of the first floor, showing and explaining the pictures of her childhood home and the various photos of her children. I hug her goodbye and thank her for everything. “I would walk you to the door, but I think I need a break” she says and I nod.  “I’d like to read this, whatever it is you’re writing.”

“Of course,” I say as I stand up from the couch again.  “I’ll see you soon Molly,” and I make my way out the way I came, happy in all the things I learned and excited to write about this amazing woman. 

Kittens: Part 2

Last post I wrote about my adorable additions to the family.  But that story has a sad side.

The week before Christmas, Storm started sleeping more, and playing less.  Now I know what you’re thinking—cats sleep! That’s like, their thing, they sleep all day. And it’s true that kittens sleep about 18 hours a day. But during those other 6 hours, my kittens were very active little guys. So we noticed. Whenever Shadow tried to play with him, he would just walk away and go lie down somewhere else. When we dangled a fun toy in front of his face, he barely raised his head. I rolled a yarn ball (his favorite) past him a couple times, and he slowly watched it pass by without moving his body.

We hoped it was just a cold or something, but after a few days, nothing had changed. We noticed he wasn’t eating very much, so we called the vet to make an appointment. Of course, this was Monday of Christmas week. Two of the vets were out on vacation, and all the other slots were filled up. But the Vet-tech promised she’d call if anything opened up.

Storm got his appointment and the Vet said he had a slight fever, and had actually lost about a pound since we got him. He took a blood sample and said he would run some tests. 250 dollars later, we had no answers for what was wrong with our kitten. They gave us an appetite stimulant and sent us on our way, and the vet called every day to check on how Storm was doing.

The day before Christmas, nothing had changed, and the Vet asked to bring him in early the day after Christmas to do some more tests.  Christmas was wonderful, and we got lots of toys for our new kittens. Unfortunately, Shadow was the only one to play with them. The next morning I woke up early and got to the animal clinic ten minutes before they opened.  We went in and found that Storm has lost another half a pound, and still had a fever. An X-ray showed that he had fluid in his abdomen, and when the vet extracted it, they discovered a straw like color, which could only indicate one thing. He told me that Storm most likely has FIP, and he seemed so sure that he said we probably didn’t have to do a test. FIP, he told me, is a fatal disease for which there is no treatment.  It’s a disease where the kitten will slowly waste away, sometimes days, sometimes longer.

I called Jim and of course started sobbing on the phone with him.  He said to do the tests, just to be sure.  A few days later, the tests came back.  Storm was diagnosed with FeLV, basically Feline Leukemia.  Although the test came back inconclusive for FIP, the vet assured us that it was the only thing that could cause the straw liquid in his belly.

But Storm didn’t seem like he was in pain. He wasn’t enjoying kitten life as much as Shadow, but he would walk upstairs and eat some tuna juice or chicken broth.  He stopped jumping into the sink. In fact, he stopped jumping anywhere, instead opting to slowly crawl onto the chair, or walk from the couch over my dresser and onto the bed. But some days were better than others. The Vet called to check in, and Jim told him with a pinch of hope, that he seems like he’s doing better today.  But the vet chalked that up to the fever dropping, and that it would probably spike again soon.

Shadow kept trying to play with Storm, wondering why he didn’t want to wrestle. He seemed to be going crazy not having anyone to play with. Storm continued to walk slowly around the house, following me upstairs just to go back to sleep again. Whenever I would pet him I would lean in close and look him in the eyes. “You tell me when you’re ready” I’d say… knowing it would have to be my decision.

He continued to lose weight, and last week he wet the bed. I didn’t even notice it until I got ready to go to sleep. Jim and I stripped the bed and did the laundry, and Storm slept on the couch that night. The next morning, the blanket on the couch reeked of cat pee.  Maybe he couldn’t feel it, or maybe he was just too weak or too tired to get up to go to the bathroom. We started putting a towel under him and trying to get him to sleep on the small (machine washable) cat bed. But sometimes Shadow wanted to sleep in Storms bed (he’s gained some weight from eating all of Storm’s leftovers) and they didn’t both fit, so Storm would move back on the bed and the next day we’d be stripping the bed and overworking the washing machine.

“I keep telling him to let us know when he’s ready,” I told Jim. “Maybe this is his way of telling us.” We agreed that it was time to let him go, and I called the Vet to make an appointment. Tomorrow morning we are taking him, and hopefully sending him to a better place… whether that’s cat heaven or reincarnation, I don’t know.

So this is my public goodbye to my kitten storm, all of seven months old. I hope those three months that you were with us were wonderful. And I hope you will be happy wherever you end up.

Kittens

Back in October, Jim-the-boyfriend and I adopted two adorable little kittens.

We had been talking about it for quite a while, more than a year, but the timing never felt quite right.  Finally, after moving back to Massachusetts, we agreed that we should just take the plunge and see where it takes us.

We disagreed on a few things, I wanted to rescue an older or middle aged cat, mainly because I’m afraid of commitment and ten years already seems like a long time to commit to an animal (and sharing the animal with another person)—and some cats live past twenty!  Jim wanted to adopt kittens. So we went to the animal shelter to see what we could find.

Sure enough, when we got there, two little kittens on the bottom shelf stole Jim’s heart.  We looked at a few others, but Jim kept getting drawn back to those two. The sign on the cage said that the two were rescued together and wanted to stay together. It also said they were four months old and six pounds.  Not exactly the *one* middle-aged cat I was hoping for, but Jim was in love. Plus, it had already taken a year of convincing to even look for a cat, so I compromised. Two kittens, instead of one, for twenty-plus years, instead of five or ten. That’s double to adoption cost, double the food, litter, etc, for twice the length of time.

But they are soooooo cute!

We brought them home the next day and gave them a little time to adjust to their new owners and their new home. At the shelter, they were named Happy and Pepper, but Jim didn’t like those names, so we did some brainstorming and came up with Shadow and Storm.

“That sounds too video-gamey.” I said, “Too much like a comic book superhero.” And I was right, Storm and Shadowcat are both names of Xmen characters.

We changed their names again to Ash and Jet, then I changed my mind back to Storm and Shadow, and within a few days, we were a little family. I was yelling at storm to get off the counter, and stop drinking water out of the toilet bowl, and get out of the bathroom sink. 

Shadow was climbing on my laptop keyboard and watching movies with me.  In the morning, Shadow likes to lick my nose to help me wake up, even when I do not want to wake up.  He also has a tendency to climb into small places... like the refrigerator. 

These kittens have brought a new happiness to my hum-drum life. They give me something to come home to when Jim works the late night shift, and someone to talk to when no-one else is around.  It's only been a few months, but I have fallen in love with these two. And all of the snuggles! 

Homesickness

As most of you know, New England got hit hard with a blizzard recently—my family in the Boston area got almost 3 feet of snow.  And as I was watching the statuses on facebook flip between “thank god I’m not in Mass” and “Travel Ban” “2 feet and still coming down” or “not leaving the house for days!” all I could think about was how much I wanted to be there.  Crazy right?  Why would you want to be in a blizzard when you’re in a place where the sun is melting away the 2 inches that fell on your car?  But snow always makes me homesick.

I actually wanted to feel that cold air on my skin and work myself warm again shoveling snow, all to be rewarded with a creamy hot chocolate by the fireplace.  I want to make snow angels in the front yard and sled down the hill in the back.  Now, my parents’ back yard is overgrown with trees and bushes, so there is no path down the hill, and we’re all “too old” to make snow angels (not that that would stop any of us).  But that won’t stop me from remembering.

I remember a time not too many years ago when the electricity went out and we made a fire and sat around playing board games by candlelight.  I have a rare fortune of being close to my family and I actually enjoy spending time with them, which, as I understand it, is not the norm.  And like most families, we have our difference and we all need some time away… but sometimes I wonder if maybe I went too far away.

After moving to Virginia, I got to go home twice last year, once in July, for my sister’s birthday, and once for thanksgiving.  My mom came to visit me a few times, but my sister and my dad only got to come down once during the whole year.  Sure, we video chat and talk on the phone once or twice a week, but it’s not the same as sitting next to each other and spending time with each other.  I didn’t realize how much I would miss my family or my hometown.

Even little things that wouldn’t normally bother me have started to make me homesick.  When my dad told me that they were getting Chinese (from my favorite place) and my sister was going there to watch “the game” (now infamously known as the deflate-gate game) with them, I actually got jealous.  Now if you know me, you probably know that I have zero interest in sports.  I never played sports, I never went to sports events.  I think I went to one football game throughout my high school career—and none in college.  Football has no interest to me.  But the fact that my whole family was going to be together enjoying Chinese food—without me!  Well, that’s just not fair.

It’s the little things that I miss the most; going to Disney movies with my sister and and analyzing them on the drive home.  I miss watching late night TV with my dad as he falls asleep in his recliner, waking himself up at the sound of his own snoring.  I miss jumping up onto my mom’s bed while she’s watching TV or playing on her computer.  I miss her showing me all the “cool stuff” her friends posted on facebook… even though I saw it on my news feed 3 weeks earlier. 

I miss standing on chairs in the kitchen with brownie batter in hand, belting along as The Foundations ask: “Why do you build me up buttercup baby…” 

I miss my dad my dad making a pun out of every-single-thing—and then when we don’t laugh, repeating the joke again just in case we didn’t understand it.  We got it the first time… still not funny the second time Dad.

I miss my mom blurting out totally inappropriate comments in like “you creamed yourself” in front of my friends when I dropped ice cream on my jeans’ zipper.  And then after my friends telling me how awesome my mom is.

I miss spending hours on the couch playing scrabble and watching movies with my sister, too lazy to get more cheese-itz, but not lazy enough to jump into warrior mode the moment someone decides to change the channel.

I miss my family.  I miss those unexpected moments that you never plan but quickly become stories you tell over and over again until they are the details that make up your life.  I miss the little things that make up my family, and that make my family my home.