There’s a New Cat In Town

If you’ve been following my personal Facebook page at all, you may have noticed we have a new family member.

Diana and I live out in the country, on a dirt road that’s a continuation of a lane-and-a-half wide, chip and seal county road. It’s not at all uncommon to see stray domestic animals out and about. Sometimes they’re come out on the wrong end of an encounter with a car.

We were heading out to meet a friend one Friday evening a couple of weeks ago, and as we drove along, we saw a calico-colored bundle of fur that looked like it had lost one of those encounters. I straddled it with the minivan, not wanting to abuse a dead animal.

Just as we passed over it, this fist-sized kitten lifted its head.

Diana and I both gasped, I slammed on the brakes, backed up, and went quickly to it. I assumed it to be injured, but I didn’t see anything obvious. I looked around for another person, or for mama cat, and came up empty. We hadn’t seen any other vehicles in our short drive, either. I picked her up, expecting her to cry out from an internal injury, or fear, but she didn’t make a sound, or act any more frightened than she already was. She smelled like a barn, and had a small scrape on her lip along with a goopy left eye.

Diana and I are both animal lovers. For all but the last four years of our relationship, we’ve had at least one fur-bearing household member. At one point, we had three cats and two dogs. By the time we hit the road, we were down to two cats and one dog, and adopted those out, thinking we couldn’t really handle them while traveling.

The kitten was clearly only a few weeks old, and we knew we couldn’t just leave her there, so Diana held her in her lap on the way to our meeting. That pretty much sealed the deal.

We took her to the vet the next day (the cat, not Diana) just to get her age set (about seven weeks) and see what injuries she might have (none obvious to the vet). He gave her anti-worm medicine, flushed out the goopy eye, gave us antibiotic ointment for that, and said, “Congratulations on your new cat.”

Then we had to choose a name. I wanted to name her Minion, but Diana had already vetoed that name back when we were feeding a feral kitten that used to hang around our house. I thought of Rogue, and got lukewarm reactions from most of the kids, although Owen really liked it (he’s a big X-Men fan). Then I came up with Lady Sif, because she’s a pretty tough warrior, and a kitten that survives very long on its own has to be pretty tough.

Did you know that calico cats are almost exclusively female? I thought that was rather interesting.

So now there’s a kitten in the house. Does that make me even more of a writer?