Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
I’m the one who’s upside down in this picture, I was laying down on my back on the hardwood floor and waited for Sam to lean over from his window seat and look down. He likes sleeping on the seat, he’s sometimes there when I come home from work and he certainly seemed to enjoy watching me work in the flower beds the other day.
Back when we first discovered some bumps on Emma’s chest, she was rewarded with a trip to the vet and got the affected area shaved so we could treat it. She was also awarded this lovely bib to make sure she didn’t aggravate the area. This is what the bib looked like after two weeks, as you can see Emma didn’t think it quite the state of high fashion and often removed it on her own (the picture there shows the bib when new). I didn’t photograph the underside, even though it looked much worse, as some of that damage was done by Sam during their roughhousing.
Emma has been a rather shy subject so I’ve ended up with more pictures of Sam than of her. The only way I got her to sit still long enough for me to drape the bib over her legs was to play String with her (you can see the shoestring under her foot and trailing out of the bottom left corner of the picture). She stopped for a moment trying to figure out why the string had stopped moving while I moved the bib and snapped her picture. You can also see part of the shaved area on her chest.
The bumps went away with treatment and now we’re in the slow process of waiting for her fur to grow back.
Little Sam hasn’t seen too much sunshine in his young life with us (I mean that literally, not figuratively) but last week we had a spate of sunny days and he discovered the joy of sleeping in sunbeams.
If this picture seems a little familiar, or even very familiar, it’s not by accident. Little Sam has joined Scout and Templeton in loving to sleep in the heated bed beside my desk.
Scout hasn’t wanted to sleep there since we brought the new kittens home, but Sam has been happy to take over her spot. We’ve got two beds now so Scout will have one available if she wants. Emma has been positively indifferent to them so far so we probably won’t need one for her.
Today was a good day. I got up before sunrise to spend a few hours at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. It was very foggy (typical for the winter) and I’m not sure the pictures will be all that special, but I saw up close a coyote, an American bittern, a red-tailed hawk, and a great blue heron snaring a Townsend’s vole. It was also nice to hear the waterfowl, even the ones I couldn’t see, as I hadn’t been to the refuge in months and many of the ducks are here for the winter.
I came home and watched the football playoff games, one of which was already in progress. At one point, Emma climbed up onto my chest and lay under my chin, I rubbed her belly and under her chin and she was visibly delighted. Then the purring stopped and I realized she had fallen asleep. Emma is very affectionate and often underfoot but hasn’t been much of a lap cat, so I’m not sure if today was an aberration or the start of something new, but she slept on me for quite a while, her arms wrapped around mine. I wanted to encourage the behavior, so I didn’t move for the duration of her nap and we stayed curled up together the entire time.
Today’s picture is not of that event since I couldn’t get to my camera but of her first week here when she was kept in the spare bedroom. One of the first things I liked about her when I saw her with the other cats at the Oregon Humane Society was how she was sprawled out as she slept, something Templeton did that I loved.
During the first couple of days that Sam and Emma joined us, we kept all three cats separated. Emma was put into the downstairs bathroom, which worked well for the first day. She wasn’t too sure of herself yet, and slept behind the toilet when she was alone and wouldn’t leave my lap when I stayed with her. The second day she wasn’t dealing with her confinement so well, so we let her stretch her legs upstairs for a little bit while Scout was napping downstairs, and she settled down outside Sam’s door. I took the opportunity to take my first picture of her outside the bathroom.
The next day she and Sam passed their physicals and Emma got to join Sam in the guest bedroom.
We’ve chosen names for our two new little ones, sticking with our tradition of taking names from characters in literature. With the previous two, we selected names from famous works, Templeton from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Scout from Harper Lee’s wonderful To Kill A Mockingbird. With these two, we’ve selected names from little known authors and forgotten works.
The little orange tabby we’ve named Sam (short for Samwise), taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. He purrs almost constantly and seems like he’d be a faithful friend, so Frodo’s faithful partner and friend seems an apropos choice. The older black kitten (pictured here) we’ve named Emma after the heroine from Jane Austen’s Emma. We chose her name because Austen is a favorite author of both my wife and I, and we think the name is lovely. She has a lovely personality, despite the intensity of her gaze here.
Today’s been an emotional roller coaster. When I awoke from the comfort of sleep this morning, I thought I was going to be OK. And I was for a while, but as the day wore on Templeton’s absence was too hard to ignore — Christmas was one of his favorite times.
I put up the Christmas tree yesterday, and that was the first time I realized something was wrong with Templeton. He loved the tree and the big box it came in, and when he didn’t come upstairs while I assembled it, I went down to get him. He wasn’t interested in the tree and was all hunched over when he walked — we left for the vet a little while later. In the space of a few hours I went from thinking he was fine to holding him as he died.
Today we decorated the tree and put up the rest of the Christmas decorations. There was the nativity set he loved to stick his head in, the ornaments he liked to play with, the tree he liked to sleep under and the tree skirt he loved to sleep on (and hack up hairballs on), the decoration that he’d chew on if we didn’t watch him, the wrapping paper he loved to play on.
Normally when I’m upset I like to snuggle up with Templeton — he loved to snuggle and would emit this wonderful purr that helped me relax. He was just so happy when he was with the ones he loved. I wish I could do that now.
I’m working on a novel in which the pets of my life are the major characters — Templeton of course is one of the main characters in the first story. One of the joys of writing is that these characters have lived in my head for the past couple of years, a mixture of the pets in real life and the characters from the story, and thinking about them has helped me when I’m down. One of the central themes of the story is dealing with loss, so they have come in useful over the past year.
Those voices have been silenced temporarily, as the present loss overwhelms my thoughts, but in the long term I know they will return. One of the characters is based on a dog named Ginger that we had when I was in college but who died very young, it’s been a joy to have her character from the book bring that lovely little dog back into remembrance on a daily basis.
I know someday soon the same will be true for Templeton, but for now it is time to grieve.
Yesterday’s picture was from January 2001 when we lived in Keizer, Templeton was playing with one of his catnip bags and took a momentary break. I had just gotten my first digital camera the week before at Christmas, so it’s one of my earliest digital pictures.
Today’s picture is from December 2004 and taken at our house here in Portland, he’s watching the Christ child in the nativity set.
Whenever I’m editing pictures of Templeton and he walks by, we always have a similar conversation. As he casually saunters by, he’ll stop and stare at the monitor. “Oh my goodness, that cat is gorgeous!”
I say nothing.
He turns and says, “I mean all cats are good looking, but this one is just beautiful — did you take this picture?”
“You know that it’s you!”
Templeton squints at the monitor. “It is me!”
“Pride comes before a fall, little one.”
“A falling cat always lands on its feet.”
“Touché.”
Make that two monsters.
Templeton has been sleeping quite a bit in the warm bed he finally discovered yesterday (in fact, he’s zonked out in it right now). He was sleeping in it earlier today when Scout came up and discovered him sleeping in the bed she has avoided like the plague. Curious as to what he was doing, she jumped up beside him and he made a run for it. She decided to mimic her hero and curled up in the bed for a bit.
She didn’t stay long, but long enough for a few pictures.
Boolie 