Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years.<\/p>\n
We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so<\/em>…<\/p>\n Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around 16, maybe 17 years. We can’t be sure because she came to us fully-formed, as a stray. This was when we lived at our previous place, the rented house on the west side of town: deep in the heart of college-student apartments, but on a very large block at whose center was an old, heavily treed forest which butted up against our back yard. Like other strays who visited us over the years there, she (and\/or her mother) possibly had belonged to a student who left for a summer and just “released” her into the wild.<\/p>\n In any case, one day I came home from work one day to find The Not-Yet Missus eager to tell me of the epic animal-kingdom moment I’d missed: this mottled tortoisheshell cat had appeared from nowhere and simply leapt, in a single fluid movement, to the top of the wooden fence surrounding the artificial pond in the back yard. Striking enough, just that much. But what elevated it to the level of a National Geographic<\/em> feature was this: the four-foot-long blacksnake trapped, writhing and whipping about, caught in the cat’s jaws.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Snake Cat<\/em>, The Not-Yet Missus at first called the new visitor for lack of a real name, and that was exactly how she called to<\/em>\u00a0the cat when she started putting food out on the patio for it. (“It,” yes. We had no idea of its gender for a while.) Because the orphan took to watching us through the glass, pathetically, sitting out on the bricks under the big live oak as rain splashed all around, The Not-Yet Missus set up a little “house” for it under the eaves: a plastic US Mail bin turned on its side, lined with dry blankets and hand towels and with a single towel draped across the cave entrance. When the patio door slid open, no matter the weather, a small freckled-brown-and-black face would appear through a gap in the covering towel, to see what of interest was about to happen.<\/p>\n “What’s interesting outside my window?” became Katie’s default mode, once she moved indoors as Cat #3<\/a>. She never played very much, unless it involved some form of human-initiated hunting. (She was a ground hunter, chasing things dragged along the floor. Dilly<\/a>, Cat #2, was an “air hunter,” grabbing for objects dangled overhead. As for #1<\/a>, Nameless — she disdained any play, unless you actually brought the bait to her and placed it on her body.) No: Katie sat in a window. Watching the outdoors — birds, squirrels, and, well, who knows? snakes — and escaping once or twice but never going far or for long.<\/p>\n And probably as a result of her early outdoor life, she never really trusted people other than The Missus and me. An excellent hider, she was, so that visitors never guessed that we even had a cat.\u00a0Especially when The Pooch arrived on the scene: more or less from that day forward, by her own choice Katie stayed upstairs in our offices, which we kept off-limits to those of a doggish persuasion.<\/p>\n Lately, Katie had been in decline for months, throwing up a meal on the average of once or twice a week. Over the summer, we took her to the vet — we explained that she hadn’t seemed in pain, had just been losing weight and getting a little, well, weird. He said he couldn’t tell without further expensive testing exactly what might or might not be the matter, except her age itself; as long as she wasn’t obviously uncomfortable, he said, we could postpone making any decisions.<\/p>\n Another few ounces lost, here and there; a little more agora- and xenophobic weirdness — adopting new hiding and napping places; her meowing weakening; the simple passage of days and weeks. It was time, finally. On Friday, she made her last trip to the vet.<\/p>\n Even when you don’t interact much with a pet, their departure leaves a little pet-sized shadow in the corner of your consciousness:<\/p>\n You catch yourself about to greet her by calling up the stairs when you get home.<\/p>\n The morning and evening routines slacken just a bit, minus the extra five minutes for scooping the food onto the plate, the thirty seconds to refill the water bowl.<\/p>\n There’s less fur and dander in the air.<\/p>\n And the upstairs window you’ve left open a few inches for years, for all but violent storms? It finally gets tugged down and sealed shut, the watcher gone for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years. We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. 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