Saturday, April 15, 2006

My Version of the Biological Clock

So I had this dream last night about kittens. In the dream, I found four little kittens, darling little things about six weeks old, just weaned. I can even remember what they looked like--three were tabby mixes, two brown tabbies with a lot of white and one silver tabby with a lot of white. The fourth one was a tortoiseshell. A male tortie, which made him extremely rare, since most tricolored cats are females.

I decided to keep the tortie and spent the rest of the dream trying to find good homes for the other three. When I woke up, I wasn't sure whether to feel sad or relieved.

When I first moved out of my family home many years ago, I got a couple of cats to keep me company. Within three years, my cat household grew to five, despite my conscientiousness about spaying and neutering, because I am apparently a stray magnet. However, of the original five, only two are left. Chunk is sixteen and in relatively fragile condition due to her thyroid problem, and Samantha is thirteen and still fairly healthy, but she has a growing dark spot in her left eye that the vets say is probably a slow-growing tumor. My mom had a cat with the same condition. She eventually lost the eye, not too long before she finally died at the age of nineteen.

As my cats get older and my time with them grows shorter, I'm struggling with the need to have a new little face in my life. I can't do that, though, because I no longer live alone. My mom and my sister and her kids live with me. And I'm not the only one in the household with cats. We have two young ones--under the age of three--that my mother and I found when they were tiny kittens. My sister has three cats of various ages, from eight to seventeen, and my mom has a seventeen year old cat as well. Plus the two dogs. We don't need any more animals.

But if a male tortie wanders up, I swear I'm going to consider it a sign . . . .

2 comments:

Carla Swafford said...

My daughters love bringing home strays. But they cause problems, such as one cat ate the corner of a cabinet (he had learned how to get downstairs by way of the laundry shoot and we had locked the cabinet door) and one dog tried to dig a hole -- IN MY CARPET! Now, no more animals in the house. Too costly for me.
Presently, we are animal-less and that's a first in twenty-five years. Maybe I'll get a dog when I quit traveling so much. That's one of the nice things about not having any animals, I can go away for the weekend without worrying who will feed him or if the hotel will allow animals.

MJFredrick said...

I get the kitten urge a lot. My baby is already a year and I'm already thinking....my friend's friend's cat is having kittens, and if I tell the dh I found it....

But I only have three cats. Now.