THE STORM HAS GONE - THE SNOW SHOVELLED - THE COLD HAS ARRIVED

NOW I’M WITH CATS-

I have once again returned to the hearthside with frozen whiskers, fingers and toes. The most recent snow storm certainly infilled our lane here at Birch Hollow. It has taken several hours to clear it out, to my wife’s specifications I should note. She has long accused me of being less than ambitious about snow removal. Suzanne likes her paths as wide as I am tall. Even though I’m not very tall, I think it’s excessive. I start off the season meeting this obligation but as the snow volume increases, she’s lucky if the path is a metre wide when all is said and done. I just can’t push it back any further from the walk without having a gas snowblower. Seeing as I’m rather inept with anything but pioneer tools, I know she’ll relent when I tell her I can’t widen the paths any more, unless we get a snowblower. She’ll look out, look at me, look back onto the yard, and reluctantly agree. The path is wide enough. Spring isn’t so far off anyway, I tell her. I know that what she’s thinking, has something to do with the unpleasant potential of me losing an arm or foot in a snow blower. As soon as I bring it up, she must immediately imagine severed limb(s) on the walkway. Next year I’m going to start pitching the idea of a snowblower earlier in the season, before she starts complaining about the width of the lane.

At this moment, I’ve inherited three of our seven cats, on my leg, stomach and shoulder. That would be Wee Angus, Zappa (after Frank Zappa) and Chutney, as related to the preserves Suzanne was making when we needed another name. The other inmates of the feline kind, include Fester, our bathroom cat, Beasley, Buddy and Old Smoky, who is about the same size as the gopher “Phil” of Gobbler’s Knob......and as well, yesterday, didn’t see his shadow when he literally rolled outside. His stomach hits the ground when he walks. We’ve put him on all kinds of fad diets but he cheats like mad each time. One day he felt cheated by the meagre offering in the dish, and actually opened the cupboard door and ripped apart a bag of dry food for sustenance. I swear he smiled at us that day, sitting on a kitchen chair, the fat cat that he is!

According to recent reports on the television, about cat hoarders, I’m starting to worry we have fallen into this here at the Currie homestead. Here’s how they all arrived.

I have been a cat fancier most of my life. My first cat was a cast-off beast that I called “Animal.” When I was editor of The Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, a lot of folks used to drop off strays because they believed, as a newspaper, we could place free adoption ads in the paper.....thus a good group of people to handle someone else’s dilemma. Animal was thrown from a moving car in front of our office, just as I was standing in front at the time. The poor little bugger did five or six flips, and a few quick, jerky rolls, before coming to rest against the curb. The kitten sustained only minor injuries and was fixed up, and pampered back to its kittenish lifestyle. I adopted Animal because no one else had the room or disposition for a rambunctious kitten that clawed everything in my apartment including me.

The second cat, Fester I, was found one bitter January night, trying to stay warm on a sewer grate on busy Quebec Street, on the same block as our newspaper office. Well, it was late, and I couldn’t let it freeze. There was no Humane Society shelter at this point in Bracebridge. No one wanted Fester and no one reported it missing. The third cat we called Tommy. When I’d come home from hockey, Suzanne insisted the equipment bag had to stay on the back steps. I agree, it did smell. Tommy didn’t mind the odor, and this is where he spent the cold winter nights. Until we realized he had made our deck a permanent stop. After considerable coaxing, and food, we were eventually able to give Tom a warm place to live that winter. We took them all to the vet, for medical care, and other stuff to avoid more kitten catastrophes. We spent a fortune on cats then, and we’re doubling that now.

Well, Tommy thanked us, one night,.....letting us have a good long pat and cuddle, then asked to go out, and never returned. I saw him one night in an ally up town, and he came to me right away when I called. We had a nice visit but he let me know his home was all-outdoors. He rubbed against me for several minutes, looked up with his beautiful eyes, and turned and ran off again. Contented to be an alley cat. It was the last time I saw that dear little creature. Even though we hadn’t been together all that long, I missed him a lot. For the next year, I’d get up from my chair or even from bed, thinking I’d heard scratching at the door. Which he was famous for during our time together.

Animal was the proverbial fat cat. It had a nasty disposition and an insatiable appetite for the outdoors. It was hit by a car one night, and she too was history. Fester was an outdoor cat plain and simple. She loved to sit on a sunny rock on the embankment overlooking The Bog, and with the back door open, spring to autumn, she’d check in at dinner time, and then go out until about 10 p.m. She’d curl up by the hearth until first light. Fester died at about ten years of age. I held her in my arms for those final few moments. We were all devastated here. No matter how many times I’d say to Suzanne, “it’s just a cat,” we couldn’t stop crying for that old stray cat we’d invited into our home just after we married.

Fester II was an abused cat we adopted quite a number of years ago now, and it had endured an unhappy relationship, as a kitten, with a nasty dog locked in a small work shed. The imprint of those days created many emotional issues for Fester, especially its need for high places to escape its pursuer. Not that anything pursues it but that’s the way it coped originally, and does today. We adopted Old Smoky from a family that had to get rid of him, and we thought it would be good for Fester to have a mate. It worked for awhile but Fester just doesn’t, (as I was told by my teachers) play well with others. By her choice, she dwells in one of our bathrooms, which she has long considered a safe have from her adversaries. We’re all a little eccentric here at Birch Hollow so we accept her differences in stride.

Sitting on the deck one evening, looking out onto our gardens.....and watching the hummingbird feeding there, we heard the familiar cry of a kitten. It’s not something we want to hear necessarily because it usually means some clown has abandoned something unwanted. We had noticed a hawk flitting from tree-top to tree-top, and we suspected it had an evil intent for whatever was calling out. We found Buddy, a tiny, under nourished kitten, on the side of the road. It had only a few minutes of life remaining, as we could see the hawk, just then, watching us from the top of a nearby hydro pole. The cars on our dead-end road travel way to fast, and it wouldn’t have been long before a car would have taken-out what the Hawk hadn’t eaten yet. We put a note up on the community mail box, just in case someone had lost this little orange beastie. Well, that was seven years ago and no one’s called yet. As Buddy’s tail had been compromised while living in the Bog, it developed a nerve disorder that causes violent spasms.....and I’ve been holding her for two of the seizure-like events. We have to keep Buddy isolated in case he was to accidentally injure the other felines. A wonderfully friendly cat that loves to be in your company.

Most recently, Suzanne had been trying to feed a seriously underweight stray we called “Beasley,” that was getting into the recycling bins for food. For months we tried to keep her weight up with milk and both dry and wet foods. As she had been so thin, it took a long time for Beasley to show the pregnancy. So having seen pregnant cats before, we naturally assumed we had some preparation time. To that point, Beasley was scared of us, and would run-off if we came too close. One night, we came home just before midnight, as we all heard the sounds......the fain meows of new life. Beasley had taken sanctuary in our crammed garden shed, and given birth to three kittens in the shelter of an old tipped-on-its-side electric lawnmower. It took a bank of studio lights and an hour of pulling items out, to be in a position to remove the kittens to a safer environs. It was the first time Beasley let us help. She must have known she didn’t have enough body weight or health to provide the kittens with what they needed. She growled once, when Suzanne put her hand close to the nest, but then got up and started rubbing against her legs. Funny thing. It was the first time she had ever come to us voluntarily, and it was as if she was asking for help, to save her babies.

All the Curries here took turns trying to save the bandy legged wee beasties. It was touch and go for several months. They all survived and all are crazy. They’ve made our house their playground that’s for sure. But they’re homegrown here at Birch Hollow, and with overflowing numbers of cats at the local shelter, and not enough adoptions to clear the cages, we decided to take what happened here as a sign.......these little darling had come to us under precarious circumstances, and would have died that same night, if we hadn’t heard that familiar plaintive cry. Odd though. It was the runt of the litter, “Chutney” that got our attention in the first place. It was Chutney we expected would die because it was so small. Well, three years later, Chutney is still the runt of the three but a healthy, over-active little beggar, who shreds my old books, quilts and chair backs. Here she is now purring away on my lap, while her brother Angus sits on the back of the chair, and Zappa has begun swiping at a loose piece of yarn Suzanne left hanging out of her knitting basket.

As a writer, these cats we have been associated, have very much impacted my work over the past 30 years. I couldn’t even imagine a house without these furry critters adding so much life and entertainment to the mix of human inmates, who also make Birch Hollow home. They are family. The old dog, Bosko, also a rescue dog, hated cats before we adopted her. Now they huddle together by this hearth and I’m pretty sure she thinks of herself as one of them.

There is a CD we play regularly here, that sums up our life and times living with cats. It was done by well known American story-teller, Garrison Keillor, and singer Frederica Von Stade, entitled “Songs Of The Cat,”........well known music turned into cat-themed songs. We couldn’t live without it either. It’s about the influences cats have on their owners and how they are truly the masters of the domain when it comes right down to it! When the cats go nuts in unison, we put that CD on at full blast, and watch them come to the door of the livingroom, in a panic, wondering if their humans have lost their marbles. It’s usually enough of a pause, to stop the running back and forth.....at least for awhile. Serenity now!

There’s something so wonderfully literary about sitting here, cats on lap, a mutt laying on my feet, and the sighs of contentment from them and me, that makes a writer want to write! There’s always one inspiration or another, here at Birch Hollow.

Bless these cats and dogs for their ongoing contribution, all these years, at making a house, truly a home.