The first stray cat I carried home squirmed in my arms. “Look what Cindy gave me,” I sang out. The kitchen door banged behind me. Mesmerized by the tiny fur ball, it shocked me when my mother grabbed the kitten away from me.
“Flea bag,” Mom said in disgust. She headed to the bathroom and ran some water in the sink. Standing beside her on the toilet seat I watched as my mother dunked the kitten, gently scrubbed and then rinsed it. Like passengers on a sinking ship, dozens of fleas jumped into the water only to swirl and drown. The kitten with its fur wet looked like a quarter of the size it had been before the bath. Mom lifted it from the basin and wrapped it in a towel and handed the cat back to me.
“Can I keep it?”
“We’ll see,” Mom said. I knew that meant she was leaning towards a no.
“P-l-e-a-s-e.”
My mother said, “We’ll see.”
“No,” I sniffled and blew my nose again. In the morning my eyes were swollen and itchy, my nose red and running.
When Mom said, “Are you ready to let go of the kitten?” I nodded.
Dad took the kitten to the ASPCA and when he got back home, he looked as sad as I felt. “I’m never doing that again,” Dad said under his breath. My mother, not being one to sugarcoat anything told me the ASPCA had too many homeless cats already. If my kitten was not adopted in a week, it would be euthanized.
After that, each time when I encountered a cat, I sneezed. If a friend had more than one cat I could barely breathe between sneezes. No antihistamine worked for me.
On Mother’s Day 1989, I heard someone talking about the cat that was in the basement hall closet at church. “It seems to have found a way to come in and get out and it has at least one kitten.”
I knew so little about cats, but my spouse said, “They must be hungry.”
It took a bit of coaxing for the Tuxedo cat and her kitten to come out for the food and fresh water, but after a while mother cat and her daughter would be waiting for us to arrive each day. In a few weeks, someone volunteered to give the kitten a home, but not the mother.
We named her Dixie. Despite my long history of allergies, we agreed that we should, at the least, take her to the vet and get her spayed.
“You will have to keep her indoors for a few weeks, just to make sure she isn’t pregnant again, before I will spay her,” the vet said.
We brought Dixie home to our no-pets-allowed apartment and fixed her a space of her own in the bathroom where she had her food dish, water and litter box. In the evening when I came home from work, I would glance up to see Dixie standing at the bathroom window looking down at me. After her surgery, she recuperated, curled up in the cat bed.
By this time, I had realized that I did not sneeze when I rubbed her under her chin or when she do see do-si-doed around my legs. We began to give her access to more rooms and she explored each room, wary of the unknown territory. Her favorite spots to sit were on windowsills. She made no attempt to go outdoors, but she would be waiting at the door when we came home.
When summer came that year, we bought our first house. The window seat in the living room gave Dixie a view of the garden and street. But no amount of cajoling would persuade her to sit in a lap.
In 1999, we remodeled our house to make space for my eight-six year-old parents. Dixie changed. When my mother took an afternoon nap, Dixie would jump onto the bed beside her. Sometimes we’d come home to find my father grinning silently and pointing to the ball of black and white curled in his lap. I wasn’t the only one who missed that kitten we surrendered more than forty years earlier.
My Turn 