Trending
Should my wife follow her head or her heart? Should she keep the last kitten, the one nobody wanted?
"I don't know what to do. What do YOU think?" she asked me.
It's a rare thing for Honey to pronounce herself unable to make a decision, rarer still to ask me to help make it.
"Well, I don't know."
I had to think about it. Turn it over, down in my thinking area.
Honey can be an instantaneous decision-maker. Her logical mind and well-ordered moral/ethical code work at computer-chip speed, sorting through conflicting issues and spitting out a keypunch card with the best, the right, the prudent, the correct, the only proper course of action. She can make Mr. Spock look wishy-washy.
She had secured loving homes for the other two kittens, Finn and Floyd. One would take Fanny if no one else did. That was the logical thing to do. The irrational thing would be to introduce a zippy, bomb-throwing anarchist girl kitty into our household of two adult, neutered male cats whose personalities, lives and routines are comfortably predictable trending to stodgy.
We did not seek parental custodianship of three newborn kittens. It was thrust upon us. Thrust upon my wife, I should say, for she bore the brunt of their demanding care.
It happened as we were visiting Honey's sister in Florida almost seven weeks ago. Late on a Sunday night, a not-so-bright feral cat climbed into the warm undercarriage of the sister's Honda CRV and birthed her kittens. We don't know how many kittens because some may have fallen out as the car was driven around town the following day.
They likely would all have died had not the adventurous one, Finn, black with a white skunk stripe on his forehead, climbed out, appearing on the concrete driveway, umbilical cord still attached, seemingly out of nowhere. It was many hours and more miles driven before we heard mewling coming from somewhere in the undercarriage. Crawling under the car, I saw and reached Fanny through a crack. I used a spatula to scoop out Floyd.
There are soft-hearted people known to soft-hearted agencies who habitually and voluntarily foster-parent orphaned feral kittens. Honey is not one of them, but she accepted the task in this case because the option was to let them die. It was one of those unambiguous rock-certain decisions she made instantly when the last soft-hearted orphan kitten fostering agency told us they were full up.
She made that decision knowing that for the drive back home, and the next four weeks, she would be feeding kitty formula by syringe every two to three hours, day and night, and wiping kitten butts each time to make them pee and poop. I helped only a little. (The 747, one of our grandsons, took the kittens for a day and night. Very commendable.)
When Honey mixed up pablum and soaked kitten kibble in formula to introduce solid food, Finn would not eat.
"If there's something wrong with Finn I may have to kill him," my frustrated wife said. She pried his jaws open and stuck dabs of food to the roof of his mouth with her finger for days until he figured it out. When Fanny would not poop, Honey said she might have to do an enema. I marveled at Honey's veterinary training and wondered at the miniscule tubing that might be involved, but never found out because the crisis passed. Literally.
The kittens took over our bathroom and stunk it up. Their favorite playground was the elasticized cloth space stretched between my ankles when I visited their room.
They learned to walk, run, climb and use the litter box. They played and wrestled and chased each other, slept curled up together in a little cat bed, and charmed everyone they met.
A girl from Butler, Pa., had asked for Finn when she saw Honey feeding the kittens at a rest stop on I-79. At six and a half weeks, my wife met her at Zelienople and handed him over. A local woman got Floyd, with his mackerel brown tabby fur. Honey gets pictures on her phone of Finn and Floyd with their new families.
We are left with Fanny, a sweet-natured kitten who lies on Honey's chest and pats her gently on the chin, and who very obviously misses her brothers.
Fanny's fur is the odd coloration called tortoiseshell. When I told Honey she looks like a baby possum, I was scolded for an unkind remark.
Our cat Fizz, hefty in body but not mind, is terrified of Fanny. Flop, our cerebral feline, is fascinated but unhappy, recognizing competition when he sees it. When the kittens first arrived, looking and sounding like mice, Flop watched with wide predatory eyes but was given no opportunity to act on instinct.
When Fanny got big enough to run around the living room and suddenly confronted Flop, he hissed. She hissed back, standing her ground, arching her back and frizzing out in witch's cat fashion. In a later inadvertent confrontation, she reached out as if to give Flop a friendly pat on the nose. That did not go over well.
"We should keep Fanny," I told my wife when I had digested her question.
"Really? Why?" she asked, wanting a logical explanation.
"Because life is short."