Tonight, I want to share a bit about the furball of love and endless entertainment that graced my life for only a few short years.
When I got there I decided to look around for myself to try to find her first, but after scouring all of the kennels in both the cat and kitten rooms I asked a volunteer about the cat in question. She looked around for herself and saw that she wasn't in the kitten room and decided to take me to another room, a room I had not been aware of in previous visits- "Cat Holding".
The Cat Holding room is where the shelter places all the cats that have come in that they haven't prepared for adoption yet. Many of them have just come in, their states of health being assessed and preparations being made for them to be spayed or neutered. As a counterpoint, the main rooms that visitors are allowed to wander around in are fairly quiet, filled with cats that have become accustomed to droves of humans stopping in to pet and play with them. They behave themselves, many of them dozing off or mewing playfully at passers-by. This new room was sensory overload.
It was utter chaos. There were rows of kennel cages 4 tiers high on every wall and every single cat was meowing in disorientation, having not had time to adjust to their new surroundings and fellow "cell-mates". The addition of humans to the situation made them all vie for our attention as if asking for us to help them escape from their unknown fates. There had to have been no less than 40 of them. If you can enter this room and not leave without a new kitty you are a stronger person than I.
My helper and I started looking for my potential new cat as they weaved in front of each other, each trying to get our undivided attention. I was scouring one of the banks of kennels with my back near another when I felt a tiny paw on my shoulder.
I turned to see who it was and was met with a tiny tabby with a snow white belly staring at me curiously and longingly with golden eyes. She reached her little white paw through the bars towards me and I took it, squeezing it gently with my fingers. I pet her head through the bars and she let out a tiny little mew.
Her paperwork was in a sleeve on the front of the cage door, giving approximate age (10 months) and the name they had decided to give her- "Turtle" (my favorite animal- fascinating creatures, but honestly pretty boring pets) because the brown mottled part of her coloring made a shell-like shape on her back. The woman had kept looking the entire time I was having this seemingly fated interaction and turned to me saying that she couldn't find the other cat. without looking away from the tiny girl cat I simply said "Can I hold this one?", to which she obliged.
My new little friend curled up in my arms and started licking my fingers. She chose me, so I had no choice but to choose her back. From that moment she became my fierce little Willow cat.
As for our life together, it wasn't always cute and cuddly. She was still such a young thing, full of energy and a penchant for acrobatics. Some cats like to hide under things or nestle down in little spaces. Willow preferred to climb as high as she could manage. The first time I let her explore outside I heard her meowing and found her on the roof of the house wanting down. I retrieved her the first two times, but told her on the third time that she was going to have to figure this out eventually and left her to her own devices for a while and she managed to find her own way down.
She wasn't the smartest cat, but she was quite clever and precocious. There were times that I could swear she had a human way about her. If I was sleeping in and she wanted to eat she wouldn't meow at me or walk on me like other cats I had encountered. She would stand on my dresser gently batting around objects until I would look at her. We would lock eyes with her paw poised in feigned innocence above whatever she had chosen. Once she knew she had my attention she would shove it onto the floor in one motion, hop off the dresser and saunter out of the room towards the kitchen. Sometimes I wondered who owned who.
Her first toy was one of those feathery batons that I would wave around and she would jump at. In my efforts to be a responsible cat mom I had read a lot of information about kitties and something I had read suggested that you make the toy act like the animal that it was supposed to be emulating. With it having feathers I made it swirl and weave around like a bird. She got rather good at catching it. Little did I know I was training a tiny serial killer.
After what she seemed to see as boot camp she starting bringing me the traditional love tokens of fallen prey. First it was bugs and then one day she ran in from outside all excited and plopped a giant grasshopper down on the sofa beside me, looking up at me with pride and a desire for approval. A grasshopper that was NOT dead.
In a cat-owner relationship, dead things are an act of provision. Not quite dead things take on a different meaning altogether. It's a sacred communion meaning they want you to help. I always disappointed her on that front, placing the wounded beast back outdoors and letting her finish the job on her own. Birds and squirrels never saw the 9 pound little badass coming.
When she became an indoor kitty she was still inclined to be challenged. Her favorite pass time was stealing all my hair ties and coercing me to play fetch with her...for hours. When I would tire of playing the game I would pretend to throw it and hide it from her, but she always managed to find another. Occasionally I would come across hoards of them while I was cleaning. She eventually drove me to using bobby pins since she stole every last hair tie I owned. She also gave little high fives when she stretched. For real.
Then she was introduced to little mouseys.
She was the kind of cat that made people who don't like cats rethink their position. People who loved cats wanted to steal her from me. Her astounding personality was one of a kind. It can never be replaced.
At the end of the day she would curl up on my lap, lick me and sleep. I adored my little kittyface with the tiny black spot on her pink nose. May she rest in peace.