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by John » Sat Jan 18, 2025 06:09 am
After I lost Poof, I was honestly thinking I couldn't go through that again. At the time, I was giving lessons to a guy and we spent a lot of time talking. I brought up Poof and that was all it took. He ran outside and came back carrying a tiny, white kitten that easily fit in my hand. Like Poof, she had been living under a mobile home. Not exactly starved, she was covered in fleas. It was the middle of November so the cold would set in soon, and I knew she'd never make it. So, shaking like the proverbial leaf, I put her on the floor of my car and made the long trip home, probably 45 minutes. When I got home, I found she'd had a rather messy accident on the car floor and I had to clean that up before anything else.
I set right to work getting rid of the fleas, not with poison but by hand, with a flea comb and a little Vaseline. It took a number of sessions but I gradually got rid of all the fleas. It was during this time though, that I noticed that she also had worms. A trip to the vet and some worm pills later, and the worms were gone.
I learned pretty quickly to appreciate both the differences and the similarities between her and Poof. Both were snow white, but Poof had longer hair and hers was shorter. Poof was also rather sedate. She was definitely not. Poof was very quiet, and she was not at all. In fact, in picking a name, she was almost called "Squeaker". She squeaked a lot. Her recklessness in running through the house, climbing and knocking things over, earned her the name, "Monster".
I had large patio doors covered in large white curtains and she loved climbing those curtains, which would have been fine, but she was pulling the rods out of the wall. In a stupid effort to stop this, I tried the squirt bottle full of water, (which I would never do now). Monster had a sixth sense about this though and would instantly jump out of the way. Monster never got a drop of water on her but my curtains would be all wet.
Eventually, other cats came into the house and somehow, they all got along perfectly with each other. Monster lived a happy and playful 15 years. One day, totally unexpectedly, Monster apparently had a brain aneurism and shortly thereafter, she was gone. Broken hearted again, this time the other cats I'd adopted helped get me through it just a bit easier. From then on, the floodgates were open to every cat in the neighborhood. John