Dispersed

Upstairs, Lily settled in quickly and became a very confident cat who has always lived according to her own mysterious plan. One has the feeling that she has an active brain, though in old age, like me she has slowed down. She is frustrated that she can no longer jump as high and she is very deaf. She also demands more attention.

And she has early stage renal failure, but unlike many other “kidney cats”, she willingly eats the special kidney diet that we hope will help slow the progress down.

Panther died of renal failure which was exacerbated by steroid treatment he had for rodent ulcer. Without the steroid, he suffered terribly with ulcerated gums, then after he died, I kept asking myself if I shouldn’t have limited the treatments.

But it was self-flagellation. Our veterinary doctors were very good and I had great confidence in them. Soon after Lily came to us, she was diagnosed with eosinophilic dermatitis, which is a variety of the same thing and she too was prescribed steroids, but we administer it sparingly, only when we see that she has a flare-up, which we couldn’t do with poor Panther.

Lily has not had a flare-up for months, mercifully.

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We went to visit two other kittens but we couldn’t bring them home.

Bengal tigers at the Cougar Mountain Zoo.

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Another time I went to see clouded-leopard cubs at the Port Defiance Zoo in Tacoma. I would far rather they were in their native habitat, even if I couldn’t see them, yet these cubs were born in captivity, so did not know anything else and they were well cared for.

They are considered vulnerable, endangered by all the usual threats, so zoos at least may preserve the species.

It felt such a privilege to see these beautiful creatures.

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Back at home, we’d had a couple of adoptions, so I was persuaded that this afforded us the room to take in some kittens. A local shelter had appealed for foster homes to take cats that were being shipped from Eastern Washington where adoptions were scarce.

Alright then. Kittens! We went to pick them up in West Seattle.

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Maks, Mikal and Oliver were brothers.

We also took in a Mum and her little girl:

(We didn’t choose the names!)

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Cinder was a very young and pretty mum. Her kitten Ella was gorgeous.

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Willow was still with us then and she was very interested in the kittens.

She mostly stayed a safe distance from their antics.

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But in quieter moments she went to say hello. I wondered if she had once had kittens.

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Playing with kittens is good for the soul. They were so cute.

There was a poignant story in all this.

When we collected the kittens from the shelter, there had been a room full of cats that had come by road from Eastern Washington. They were not all spoken for, but we’d agreed to 5 which I’d thought was already ambitious.

As we got our little lot loaded up, we noticed an older tabby cat. The woman who had travelled with the cats said he’d been surrendered by his owners who’d named him Useless.

Driving home, we talked about that boy and by the following morning I had convinced Grant to call the shelter to ask if he was still there and if we could take him. He was, but now we would have to pay an adoption fee. Grant pointed out that we were taking him as a foster like the others, but they insisted. So we agreed to pay and Grant went to fetch him.

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The first thing we did, obviously, was give him a proper name: Toby

He was lovely and so much like Joey, when I see photos it is hard to tell them apart, but Toby had a nick out of his left ear.

Toby was absolutely wonderful with the kittens, watching over them.

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But he spent a lot of his time with Cinder and Ella. They made such a sweet family.

Hoping for two bonded cats to be adopted together is optimistic, holding our for 3 would have seemed foolish, so when a lady came to meet Toby and wanted to take him, we reluctantly had to let him go.

When we came back from delivering him to his new home, I noticed Cinder searching for her friend. It was one of those sad moments that are sometimes inevitable.

Even now it makes me teary.

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But not long after, Cinder and Ella were offered a home together. They went to live with a sweet woman who had two teen-aged boys. Those lads loved the cats and made a fuss of them. I sometimes saw pictures of them on Facebook. It feels refreshing to know that young people still care about animals.

Maks went to live with my friend Denise and moved to Houston. Oliver went to live as a companion to another animal whose buddy had died in a sad freak accident. And Mikal went to live up in Redmond where he got renamed Flynn. I don’t imagine he ever knew he was called Mikal, so I’m sure that didn’t matter.

Thus, the Eastern Washington cats were all dispersed.

But that didn’t mean the suites remained empty…

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