Hero Kitty

She wasn’t supposed to be my cat and she wasn’t supposed to stay for more than a few weeks. We had some friends that got evicted their home and didn’t have a place for their cats. I said I would take the kitties till they got another place where they could have them. Everyone told me not to do it but I didn’t want the kitties to be taken to the pound or taken to an empty lot (believe it or not this was ones of their plans before I told them that they’d better not dare to use such a solution if I knew about it!) Anyway, my friends had no real options so I took the cats in for them. We already had 3 cats that were not happy about the newcomers so we fixed up a nice space in the garage for the 2 new arrivals. I thought it would be a temporary situation but weeks turned into months and then despite my continued ignored pleas for their owners to take one of the cats to the vets because she just seemed sick to me the ailing kitty died. She was pretty old and I don’t know what was wrong with her but this left the other kitty, Sasha, alone in the garage and Sasha, it turned out, did not want to be alone. She was mostly OK out there till her buddy was gone but once that happened she would constantly meow pitifully at the door and jump up to try and turn the knob. She somehow succeeded in knocking over an empty ten gallon glass aquarium which of course shattered all over the garage floor. She even succeeded in letting herself in a few times, a feat that both impressed and annoyed me. So even though our other cats really were not happy about Sasha even being on the property I let Sasha into our house and into my heart and there she will forever stay as she is my kitty now. I’ve made it quite clear to my friends that she will never be theirs again even if they do ever get their shit together. It’s been over 3 years now and they still don’t have a place to live so I think it was a good decision.

Sasha is a very unusual cat to say the least and she won me over pretty quickly. She really acts more like a dog than a cat which is why I often refer to her as my little PuppyCat. She walks on a leash, follows me everywhere along with our dog comes when I call or whistle for her and actually minds me. Once I heard a big racket of bluejays squawking and I went to investigate and there in the very tip top branches of our neighbors 60 foot Maple tree is Sasha trying to get at the birds nest. I hollered at her to come down and she actually minded me! This was my first clue that Sasha was not your usual kittycat.

I think that when Sasha was made they gave her an extra cup of sweetness, and extra cup of brains and 2 extra cups of trouble! She’s not the easiest cat. She hassles our other cats, frequently puts the dog in her place and has eaten several prized goldfish and one small koi! We have to keep her in the house now to protect our pond fish and even had to cat proof the backs of our aquariums as she actually has twice now gotten fish out of the small 1.5 inch opening in the back of the tank. One ended up a kitty snack, the other was saved literally from the jaws of death by my quick thinking. Sasha’s also the messiest eater and drinker I have ever seen. For some reason she doesn’t want to put her face into the cat food dish preferring to swat the food out of the dish and eat it off the floor. She also cannot drink water like a normal cat and insists on dipping her front paw in the water and licking the water off her paw. She then likes to jump up on the sofa leaving a few wet pawprints along the way. She’s such a little butthead but she’s also my little baby and a true hero. She saved all of our lives one night.

So to get to the hero part. It was winter and only a few months after we had taken her in and a little after 3AM Sasha started bugging me. Sasha often sleeps in the bed with us and sometimes she just decides it’s time for a little attention in the middle of the night. She has the absolute loudest purr I have ever heard and generally starts by simply purring in my ear and usually I can pet her for a few minutes and/or let her under the blankets and she goes back to sleep. Not this night. She just kept walking over my head, meowing in my ear and being a general annoying nuisance and I was sleepy! I kept pushing her away but she wasn’t letting up. She seemed to want me to get up and open the bedroom door for her as she kept running to the door.

Finally she got more insistent and started putting her paw on my cheek, she even bit my ear lightly at one point and then jumped right on my stomach a couple of times. I was starting to get really annoyed. Finally, now completely angry I got up and opened the door it hit me. The strong smell of gas! I went out to the kitchen and discovered a front burner on the stove had been left on low but wasn’t lit! I turned off the burner and opened all the windows and made sure my son, who sleeps in the room closest to the kitchen with his door open was OK, he didn’t appreciate being woken at 4:00 AM but when I told him about the gas he understood. Nobody knew when the burner was left on or why it wasn’t lit. It could have been a real disaster considering that our programmable thermostat was set to kick the gas heater on at 5:00AM.
When it had first become clear to me that my friends were not going to get it together and take their pets back I had been feeling taken advantage of and put upon by these friends that basically had abandoned their cats with us and I had been questioning if it had been then right move. I had even gone so far as to exclaim to people that maybe it wasn’t worth it trying to do nice things for people when they used it just to take advantage. Now I know that I did do the right thing and that karma is real! I think that I probably saved Sasha’s life by taking her in. She knew something was wrong that night and was just trying to return the favor. Nobody will ever be able to convince me of anything different. Sasha still likes attention in the middle of the night sometimes, but she has never since absolutely insisted that I open the bedroom door. I couldn’t imagine my life without my little hero now and I am thankful that my friends were such idiots, and that I did what I could to help them anyway. Nobody will ever take her away from me. She’s my kitty till the day she dies which will be a very sad day for me indeed.