White Cat April 26, 2008
Posted by indigobunting in Uncategorized.trackback
Last Sunday I scrubbed the worst of winter off the front porch before some friends showed up for dinner. This entailed pulling out the little hose cart and hooking it up to the only outdoor water source. Being lazy, or reasoning that maybe I might water something later in the week, I left it there.
The water source happens to be right by our bird feeders, which happen to be right by our dining room windows.
There is a white cat who lives across the street who (each year) immediately begins to use this hose-cart contraption as his blind. He parks himself there, right at the base of the bird feeder. Sometimes he practically falls asleep. I knock at the window. He looks up lazily. (He has green eyes, for those of you who might have been wondering if he’s one of those blue-eyed deaf ones.)
I just walked to the post office to see if Netflix had delivered on its promise. They hadn’t, but I got my annual threatening letter from my mortgage company asking me to fax them proof of my homeowner’s insurance or all sorts of terrible things were going to Happen to Me. I thought I’d ruin someone else’s day, so I moved the hose cart. Cat dashed away. (I actually had planned to move it before I got the threatening letter.)
I used to think there was just one white cat until I saw two on the porch across the street (the porch, in fact, of the house in which I used to live). Then I was corrected—there were three white cats in the household. This seems statistically odd, but on my last Portland trip I discovered that I have two friends there who each live with two black cats. Maybe that’s statistically odd, too. It’s early. I’m not actually thinking this through.
I just went downstairs to heat up my coffee. The birds are back.
Route 153 
Three white cats in one household seems odd, statistically and otherwise. We’ve got a black cat and a black and white cat. Perhaps we should get a white cat to even it out? What would Monk do?
Glad your birds have their safe bath back though.
My first cat, received on Christmas when I was four, was white, so I called her Snowball. She was as chilly as her name. Downright antisocial, in fact. And she got grumpier the older she got.
One day my mother, laden with groceries, discovered that someone had placed a tiny calico kitten in her car in the store parking lot. She brought it home and we named it Tinkerbell (because she was so small), and she quickly became our favorite, which Snowball likely didn’t mind anyway since she could now be as solitary as she wished.
Tinkerbell gave birth to Rascal, and both mother and daughter had litters within a month of one another, so we ended up with thirteen cats at once, despite the fact that we were decidedly not cat people. We were dog people, but we only had one dog, a half-boxer, half-Great Dane named Rusty, and he was the cats’ protector.
We found homes for most of the kittens; the rest finally ended up at the pound, though it broke our hearts. Snowball snarled herself to death after another year or so. Tink died of something or other a year later. Then poor old Rusty’s kidneys failed.
Rascal moved to the Virgin Islands with us and lived to a ripe old age.
For many years, we also had two white cats, brothers. One has gone on to the catnip field in the sky, but his brother still sits on the porch.