Beloved Cat

 

I found her on February 7 under Cletus's bed and I'm guessing she'd been there about 2 weeks but Cletus was so sick at the time we were distracted and unsure when we'd last seen her. Given how sick she'd been we knew it wouldn't be long. We just didn't want to take the last cat to the vet the way we did the two before. She was taking comfort. So were we. Nomans was gone and we had his cat. His dead brother's cat. The last cat. I guess when you run away you run from everything.

We put her in one of the freezers in the garage that held mostly local beef at that point. She was wrapped in a pillow case and then double bagged before going in a box sealed with duct tape. We're big on duct tape around here. We were waiting for something because we could have lit a fire and thawed the ground enough to bury her in February. We could have put her in during one of the thaws. We could have put her in six weeks ago. I guess we were waiting for him to come home. He didn't.

The girls and I went to Bikram this morning (Cletus and one of my surrogate kids - there are at least two these days) and then came back to shower and sweat ourselves up again cleaning the house. We stopped at Walmart on the way back. To really understand this you have to know that Bikram is ninety minutes of essentially Hatha yoga at 105 - 120 degrees and 40 to 60% humidity. You go in there early to acclimate and center yourself and you stay late to let everything go. So we were saturated. Seriously saturated as in soaking through the dry clothes we put on before we left. Anyway, we bought a home waxing kit because the girls wanted to play. So I cleaned and they waxed themselves. I don't mean legs because they'd both shaved recently. I mean tummies, necks, backs, you name it. Not that anything needed to be waxed. Just slightly bizarre adolescent girls playing on a Sunday afternoon.

During a rest period I noticed that the sun was finally out and the temps in the 50s which is a good time to dig. We decided it was time to bury Wicious and so I sent a text to Nomans asking him if he wanted to come or wanted us to wait. He didn't. So we did. Dug a big hole up against the garden fence where I'm unlikely to dig deep any time soon and dug a hole in the soil down to the clay and then some, about three feet. Then we took the cat out of the box, out of the bags, even out of the pillow case. Skin so sleek and beautiful as if she'd just curled up and gone to sleep.

We covered her up, packed down the soil and found a big rock and a caterpillar. The fuzzy kind that curls up in a ball to protect themselves. I haven't seen one in years around here. Found this little guy under the rock I pulled up to mark the grave.

Life and death waits for no one and the world moves on.