I've always loved cats. But because of my asthma, doctors told my parents "no pets," not even stuffed animals.
I was quite little, probably not even five, when my stuffed white cat and three little stuffed kittens disappeared off my bed. My mother, adhering to the order, had thrown them away without telling me.
But then I developed chronic hives as an adult. With the amount of medicine I now take to suppress histamine, I can live with cats. I do have to change my shirt and wash my hands if I pet one. But that's just good hygiene anyway.
As a kid, I also loved stories with super natural premises, like this one this one by Helen Rushmore. But I was disappointed that the supernatural part in that book wasn't real.
So I incorporated that idea into my BryonySeries - and at the request of my publicist, I wrote this short story.
So with that introduction, meet my six.
Frances is our original cat. She was an (approximately) nine-month-old stray that had roamed Channahon for a few weeks (so the villagers told me) when she appeared at our back door one afternoon in late October.
I was in the attic on the phone interviewing someone for a Herald-News story when Rebekah burst in, telling me Daniel was feeding tuna to a cat.
It got cold that night, so we let her in, red jingle bell collar and all. Our terrier mix Scooter wasn't happy, but Frances, having lived by the canal, was nonplussed. She looked at him like, "Oh, does he stay?"
We asked around, and no one claimed her, so we spayed and kept someone's kitten. I don't know if she got separated from someone or if she was abandoned, but whoever you are, please know we love her, and she's had a great life.
This is our second stray - Midnight - who is reading a book by J.L. Callison to my crocheted mouse, Bertrand.
My oldest son had stumbled upon an abandoned litter; Midnight was one of them. He found a home for all of the kittens but her, saying she was too skittish to place. We kept saying, "no." He kept saying, "yes" and talked us into it.
That was 2006 or 2007.
She is still skittish - whether from bad early experiences or her personality, we don't know. But she was sick and full (and I mean FULL) of tapeworms and ear mites when we got her, so we didn't expect her to live.
But live she did, becoming our most affectionate and cuddly cat. You can pet her for a very long time and wind up in more fur than is on her.
The only bad part about all the tapeworms is that the veterinarian would not spay her until she was free of all segments, which took a long time.
So on the coldest night of the year (18 degrees below zero), our unpsayed Midnight ran out of the house at 1:30 in the morning as we were leaving for the Herald-News distribution center to deliver newspapers.
We could not find her but once we came back to Channahon to deliver, we kept zigzagging off our route to run around our yard in the dark, yelling "Midnight! Midnight!"
Yeah.
At 4:30 a.m., Midnight slunk out from beneath our front deck with three other cats, and she wasn't cold at all.
Soon, we noticed Midnight was putting on weight. You guessed it!
But my husband Ron wouldn't hear of us giving up the kittens. In fact, he named them Faith, Hope, and Charity. Here they are.
Faith is a calico who thinks my desk chair is hers, but she does let me perch on it to work. She was the most adventurous of the litter (the one who climbed over the old VCR tapes to discover the world before she'd even opened her eyes), and she is the most skittish of them all - as in skittish PLUS.
She has kitty Asperger's (if there's such a thing) because she freaks out at any disruption in her routine.
She likes the same food at the same times three times a day in the same bowl laid out in the same place on the same spot on the carpet.
She wants to be petted the same way at the same time of the day everyday. This is no lie
She never used to be petted, but we trained her to accept them. She's still squirmy, but she likes pets.
It goes like this: pet some, writhe away and then come back for more. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
It's interesting to see the family resemblance.
This is Hope, our torti. Like all torties, she is independent and with a torti attitude.
She was the most athletic pf all the cats and could scale trees and roofs with amazing speed and agility, even sliding down tree trunks as if they were firemen poles.
She is now living with a lovely family in Morris. She became separate from us during the whole "losing our home fiasco," and we thought she was gone forever after three months past.
Apparently, she had found herself a new home, just strolled right through the door as if she owned the place. The homeowner had just lost a cat and was delighted - until he discovered she was chipped and belonged to us.
Because we had lost the house in Channahon (long story) and were living in a rental situation, we couldn't keep another cat.
So Jim kept her temporarily. But that was in 2014 and there is no way we would remove her now (unless he told us to come and get her).
We keep in touch, and we may visit her anytime. But we have not seen her since COVID, and we miss her.
We wished we had better photos of Faith and Hope's brother Charity. He had a Mufasa look, and was sweet, affectionate curious, and mischievous.
He was the first to discover the invisible fence didn't stretch as high as the north garage and easily leaped over to the neighbor's garage and into freedom.
He had a wire fetish and chewed through anything that looked like a cord in our house. If you set your headphones on the table to tie your shoes, they'd be in two pieces when you stood up.
If you walked away from the laptop to drain the macaroni, you'd come back to the charger cord bit in half.
One day on deadline, my internet went down. Before I could message my oldest son, my son came charging up the ladder steps, yelling a variety of strong and colorful words I won't repeat here.
He marched straight to my window, looked up, and shouted more unmentionables.
Apparently Charity had chewed through the ethernet cable - and lived to tell about it. Smart cat: he hid from my son.
And yet this same cat, as a kitten, climbed up a tall tree in our yard and couldn't figure how to get down. After mewing very frightened mews for over an hour, we did what all the children's storybooks said to do: we called the Channahon Fire Department.
A truck and crew came out, parked the truck, and looked up the tree at our kitten. One fireman said he had no idea how to get him down and that the ladder wouldn't reach that far.
"He'll figure it out," he told me.
And then they left.
But Charity didn't figure it out. About thirty minutes later, my youngest son climbed up to get him.
Charity died in 2013 from an intestinal blockage, most likely from something this curious cat should not have eaten.
We like to say he used up his nine lives.
This is Alex, the sweetest of the bunch and really not ours.
He was a four-paw declaw and the sweetest, gentlest, most affectionate cat you'd ever want to meet.
He belonged to my oldest and came to live with us when my son and his family did, too.
Unfortunately, my other cats didn't accept him, so he marked his territory - EVERYWHERE!
We could not bring that into a rental situation, so when we lost the house, the Will County Humane Society rehomed him for us (oh, how he cried!) Ironically, he went to one of our veterinarian's clients.
We lost track of him after that. I hope that Alex, like Frances, is having a happy, wonderful life.
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