By: Cia Huston Dreves
It seems this little porch of mine has become both a place of rest and of reflection. It’s a place to begin my day with a cup of hot coffee and wait for daylight to brighten the surrounding trees. It’s a place to take a break from work in the heat of the noonday sun. It’s a place to consider where I am going and to reconsider where I have been. Today it is a reminder that I have become two things that I would never have guessed could apply to me. Here I am “the widow woman” and, horror of horrors, I have become “the cat lady.”
In the first days and weeks of life alone in the house that I thought I knew so well, I discovered noises that had previously gone unnoticed: the sounds of the ice maker filling in the night, the successful landing of a tree frog’s leap onto a window screen, the noise the air conditioner would make before it actually turned on. They all became unnerving intrusions into my awareness. Make no mistake about it; I do not live in a quiet neighborhood. My night neighbors are crickets and cicadas, numerous species of incredibly vocal frogs and night birds, including bared owls who eerily call to each other from distances beyond the Cypress pond. Then there are rabbits and opossums and armadillos scurrying in the underbrush, each to his own tempo. Each sound was investigated and, curiosity satisfied, each was relegated to the comforting category of “absolutely normal.” Each, that is, except one.
Not every night, but once or twice every month or so, there was the sound of crunching leaves beneath my bedroom windows. The sound was so distinct and so unfamiliar that I hung heavy curtains and began sleeping with a gun under my pillow.
As the second summer turned into the second fall and the permanency of my widowhood thoroughly settled in, I determined to put on my big-girl britches and face reality head on. That was about the time that stupidity, masked as courage, got the better of good common sense and I ran headlong into the night with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, yelling something at the top of my lungs, but I can’t remember what. I’m sure that if there had been a person anywhere near my house that night, he would have dropped dead, either from fright or from laughter. What a sight I must have been. I certainly reduced the number of lives remaining to the little black-and-white cat that darted away at breakneck speed.
For almost two years, the little cat and I had periodic unpleasant encounters. She came around seldom enough that her appearance was always alarmingly unexpected. She would scoot across my path and be gone or flit away when I opened a door. It always caused me to jump. Always, I let her know that she was unwelcome by hissing at her or spraying the hose in her direction. She was not a pretty cat—scrawny, imperfectly patterned and unusually small for a cat that I knew to be well grown, as she was not a kitten when first we met.
Sometime in the late weeks of last winter, when Florida generally suffers a days-long nightly freeze, I thought I’d sit in the sun on the deck. I opened the door and there she was, my little nemesis. This time she turned to face me and hesitated a moment before running away. It was then that I understood: This poor little feral cat came to my house to hunt. I had no shortage of moles and frogs and lizards. Suddenly, I thought of her as being alone like me but with none of the comforts I enjoyed. (Tender heart = mistake number one.) I poured her a bowl of milk and returned to the house.
By early March we had become friends. I found myself with “cat food” regularly added to my shopping lists. The cat, who I un-affectionately called “Cat,” had taken to jumping in my lap when I would sit on the deck. My allergies flared and Claritin also became a regular addition to my shopping list. But Cat gained weight and if not “pretty” at least looked robust and healthy. Then, April 1 she disappeared, leaving me to wonder how she knew to play a joke on that day. But it turned out the joke was on me.
She came back a few days later but continued to run off to the woods for hours at a time. In June, she explained her strange behavior as one by one she brought her three kittens to meet me on the deck. Four cats! I was beside myself. Literally, I was having conversations with myself. I would take Cat to the vet immediately to be spayed so that nothing like this could happen again. As for the kittens, (mistake number two) I agreed with myself that I would feed them but I would not name them and I would not like them. They were thoroughly feral kittens and, for the most part, unapproachable.
Oh, how fickle I am! Sparky was the first to be named because he was gutsy and self-confident. But he was a she, which of course cost a premium at the vet. Spot was named some weeks later. It was a name with neither emotional attachment nor imagination, her being a solid gray cat with a quarter-size white spot on her chest. Yes, another female. Turtle was the last to visit the vet…a difficult capture that was. And, yes, another female so named because her black coat takes on a reddish-brown tint with the summer sun giving it a tortoise-shell appearance.
The kittens are half again as large as their mother, becoming a year old on April first. Perhaps it’s not so much that the joke’s on me, as it is that God has a way of working things out. As I sit on my otherwise quiet front porch each morning they go out of their way to entertain me. They practice stealth moves among the flowerbeds clumsily ambushing each other, sometimes doing acrobatics as the result of a headlong assault, sometimes racing into the highest branches of the trees to plan their strategies. They drink from one birdbath and leave the other for the birds. It seems there is life all around me and I smile at the thought. But, horror of horrors, do I really have to be “the cat lady”?
Cia Huston Dreves enjoyed a 37 year career in Advertising as artist and writer before retiring. She has also written, directed and produced documentaries, published the How-To book “Find Cash in Your Kitchen” and maintains the blog, “Still Finding Cash” at blogspot.com.