Trego's Mountain Ear

There were no kittens in my early life . . . Navy housing, and the first opportunity was when the folks bought a home on 2 ½  acres in the Puget Sound area.  Sweetwater Creek along the back of the little place, and a small barn – like our one Guernsey cow, our cats were barn cats, not house cats.  Likewise, when we moved to Trego, we started with Tom – a black and white cat who lived in the barn and drank fresh milk morning and night.  Thinking about it, I suspect having one tomcat was Dad’s way of avoiding kittens back in 1960.  Still, kittens showed up – there has long been the concept of dumping excess cats near a farm . . . it puts the responsibility on someone else.

Renata had housecats – so from the time I got married, I learned that living with cats in the house was my new normal – and since one of her cats had died, I was granted the responsibility of getting another.  Sunshine was a little starved down tabby whose idea of sport was hunting down box elder bugs.  Those two were with us from Chinook, through Trinidad, back to Trego and then Libby.  In Libby we replaced Midnight with Dusty – another young cat who had been dumped on Dad, and turned out to be faster than a mountain lion and the best hunter in South Dakota.  We took in Smoke in Libby – but he wasn’t faster than the lion.  Then Basil as a kitten.  Dusty and Basil made the move to South Dakota – and taking care of Basil as his kidneys failed him was my task as I went through chemo. 

That led to Spice – a fluffy orange kitten brought in by two heavily bandaged grad students.  My grad students had made a tactical error – they thought that he was friendly because he stood still while the other kittens fled.  Spice, however, had an attitude, and was committed to standing as rear guard.  The shredding stopped briefly when the two got him into the car, but he added a few pains as they got out and emptied our first aid kit.  The small demon cat got out, met Sam and the Pomeranian, hissed at Dusty, then decided that Shadow the Pom needed a protector.  Congestive heart failure took Spice young, and Dusty’s kidneys didn’t last long enough for him to return to Montana.

So we’ve been 8 years without housecats . . . and for a change, we’re starting with two kittens.  After the first week, I’m hypothesizing that 2 kittens can create four times as much chaos as one kitten can – I’ve never had two kittens indoors simultaneously.  My experience is with a single kitten and a grumpy adult cat – it’s a new world for this old man.  And I kind of like it.