Belle

She is going to get me in so much trouble….

She just likes to be where ever I am.  Actually I’m not her first choice.  If Rick is around she’ll head straight for him.  Animals really like him.  Only he has rules he wants the pets to follow and I find it wearisome to enforce them.  She hops up.  I put her down.  She hops up.  I put her down.  She finally wins.  It’s just easier on both of us if I pretend not to notice she is up there in the first place.

The table is one of those places she isn’t supposed to be (and I can just predict the number of people that are going to start turning down my dinner invitations from now on.  Honestly – I change the tablecloth before guests arrive.  I swear.).  The table where I set up my laptop and spend about ten hours of the day.  She hops up, comes over and starts licking me on my nose then she settles down for a little self-grooming.

She just snuggled herself right into my heart the minute I laid eyes on her.  My youngest (Evan) and I went to the local animal shelter "just to look."  45 minutes later I was signing paperwork and trying to figure out what exactly I was going to tell Rick when we got home.  When we first saw her she was about nine weeks old and she was curled up in a teeny ball at the back of the cage, sleeping.  Evan was more interested in the livelier kittens but she caught my eye and I asked if I could hold her.  The rest, as they say, is history.

I think I have always had cats.  Growing up it started with Himalaya, then Krishna (hey it was the 60’s, baby), then Ace of the Arctic North, then Baby Nels, then Dave, then Dolly Mae, then Baby (who actually hated me and thought I was a terrible mother.  Seriously.  She would bite me whenever my own babies started crying – like I wasn’t moving fast enough or something), then Sarge, then BooBoo and finally Belle. 

And lest you all think I’m a nutso cat lady or something I’ve only had two cats at any given time.  Although I see nothing wrong with more….

I have to tell a Baby Nels story – he was actually my sister Mary’s cat.  We think he might have been gay but that’s neither here nor there.  He was a black and white cat and he would ignore you unless you spoke to him in a falsetto.  He disappeared, like cats are wont to do now and then.  After a day or two we became concerned.  My father, who generally professed annoyance or, at the very least indifference, to all of the household cats, was at work (Stanford University) and spied a black and white cat in the parking lot.  Now keep in mind work is about six or seven miles from our house and it would be an amazing coincidence that Baby Nels managed to run away to the very place my father worked – never mind all that – my dad scooped him up and tossed him in the trunk of his car and brought him home.  We all took one look at this very perplexed cat and knew in a second it wasn’t Baby Nels.  Ah well, says my Dad and washes his hands of the entire project.  So my sisters and I piled into the car, drove back over to Stanford to the very spot my father said he kidnapped the poor creature, and in front of a bunch of horrified onlookers who I’m sure thought we were the sort of people that would throw kittens out on the side of the road ~ we let the cat go.  I’m sure for the rest of his days he would shake his head and retell the tale of being thrown in the back of someone’s car and the explaining he had to do when he did finally get back.

I would like to finish this tale with the real Baby Nels’ return but I honestly can’t remember if he did or not.  Isn’t that terrible?  I think he did – like cats do – just show back up and sleep for two days and not want to talk about it.  Maybe one of my sisters can remember.