Luckily, I am having a white sand Christmas.
I have, so far, read ‘Gone, Baby, Gone’ and ‘The Last Town on Earth’, a lovely book about a town that quarantined itself during the flu outbreak in 1918. I am (re)starting Anna Karenina, and then I will head towards another pile of serial killer novels. Lots of books.
Hope everyone is having a somewhat calm holiday.
Here she is, even scrawnier than she looks in this photo. I am trying to rehydrate her, so she gets alternately water and watery milk (along with cat food). I’ll buy kitten milk for her too, which is better balanced for cats, and higher calorie.
I was sitting on the couch holding Conrad Black (the unincarcerated kitten version) and Eva-the-unfriendly starts meowing outside. I know it’s Eva because no other cat in this house meows so loudly. Sister, I say, go let in Eva. She doesn’t like Eva and claims she will run away when she sees who is opening the door. Perhaps, but then she will also stop meowing, so it counts as a win. My sister goes outside and looks and tells me that it doesn’t look like Eva, she thinks it is Matilda.
Matilda!
I go outside and though it is dark and she’s in the bushes, it does indeed look like Matilda. I try to go out but can’t find the right boots, grab two similar left shoes, ask my sister’s friend to find me my boots, and instead my sister gives me my father’s far too big boots. I run out in the foot of snow with snow melting into my feet and she meows a bit more then runs away from me. Hops, really, because the snow is too deep to run. Away.
So I am running after her with my feet and calves freezing off, since it’s minus seventeen degrees out and they’re both soaked, and she runs into my neighbour’s back yard, and I call her for a while, then shake my head and jump their (low) fence. She runs under the deck (has a 5 or 6 foot high unlit storage space underneath), still meowing for me to follow her. My sister has followed me out with a can of wet cat food and catnip, and I open them and try to place them somewhere for her to eat. Eventually I can grab her neck while she’s eating and yank her out from under the whatever they have there.
I take her back inside, make everyone touch her bony bony body (she might weigh 2 pounds now, but maybe not — her normal weight is 4-5 pounds, because she is a runt), and feed her more (she ate about 2/3 of a can of wet cat food). She is currently curled up asleep next to me, and I am figuring out the best way to kill her. I was sure I was never going to see her again.
So my cat is back. It might have taken a month, and there is very little left of her (she is otherwise fine — a little shaky at first, and one small cut, and otherwise nothing obviously wrong), but she is here. I was going to thank people for the nice thoughts, but it was too depressing, so I didn’t. And now I can. Welcome back, Til.
I just read a book about Nefertiti and her sister, along the lines of Margaret George’s biographical fiction (is there a better name for this? I am too lazy to look it up). And I realised how much I enjoy this genre, especially about people I don’t know much about. Help me find some other authors who do this. I’ve read the set about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (too lazy to look up the author, again), and I also read things that are less fictionalised and more non-fiction (like Alison Weir) — but there are a lot of boring non-fiction books out there (and boring fiction), and it’s hard to pick out books in this vein sometimes.
I’d ideally like books that aren’t about the Tudors.
So my cat seems to be gone for good. I am very upset. Distraught would be a good word for it.
Appropriate responses to this post are all along the lines of “I’m very sorry”; inappropriate ones include “I’m sure she’ll come back”, “why didn’t you do [whatever]”, “have you considered trying [something else]”, “she’s only a cat”, and anything else that suggests that I am too upset, a bad person, a stupid person, or anything that suggests that I should be hopeful. (I admit: part of me is hoping that this active “lost cat” post is the magic thing that makes her return. But I also know that it won’t happen and she’s never coming back.)
Tonight, my 14 year old sister, after I had made both challah and sugar cookies: “Oh shit, can we eat bread?”
A few moments later, she explained the story of chanukah: Moses was making bread and didn’t have enough bread and he had to use oil instead, and then the electricity went out and instead of baking more bread he used the oil for a candle, and it ended up lasting for 8 nights, so we celebrate for 8 nights.