One of the challenges of crafting a weekly newspaper column is writing for a reader who may know your work well and one who may never have read your work before. That being said, I think it is good to share updates about some of the animals that grace this column from time to time. Which leads me to the following story…
Two years ago exactly, I wrote about a tiny, cream-and-yellow striped kitten our visiting Italian friend found crying in the corral. The poor thing was smaller than the palm of his hand, minutes old — she still had a damp umbilical cord — and her mother was nowhere to be found. I took her to the house and mixed a bottle of kitten milk replacer for her without a hope in the world that she would survive. She was just too tiny.
She had other plans, though.
“This kitten has something big to do,” I would tell people. I had no other way to explain the strength of her will to live or how she kept bouncing back from grave illnesses. When the kitten was about 6 weeks old, finally healthy and thriving, one of my best friends from college and her husband came for an extended visit and fell in love with the little one.
This was a surprising turn of events because neither my friend nor her husband had had a pet during their adulthoods and had never really wanted to have one. But for some reason, this kitten captured their hearts, and they started brainstorming how to rearrange their lives to include her.
I already had two official house cats and another unofficial one who was constantly sneaking in Trojan-horse-style between the legs of the dogs, plus countless barn cats lounging on the patio furniture, fence posts and garden paths. It was a veritable embarrassment of cats. I did not need another cat. But this kitten felt more like my child than a cat, and I didn’t want to let her go.
I cried for two days when she left. I was full of regret.
Multiple times over the following weeks, I contemplated jumping in the car and driving through the night to get her back. I would have done it, too, but one thought stopped me: She’d obviously come here to have a big life, and as much as I’d hoped it would be with me, I also felt somehow that she was meant to have a storyline that outgrew me.
Then, just before my friends moved into a new house with Dakota (the name they’d given the kitten), my friend’s husband was diagnosed with cancer. He started treatment immediately, and they also started sending me pictures of Dakota. In each, her bright, slanting eyes gazed at the camera with calm dignity, and in every photo, she was snuggled beside my friend’s husband, as he rested on the couch or lay with him in bed, tucked into the crook of his knees, watching over him. If there were any lingering doubts in my mind about whether or not Dakota was meant to be their cat, they disappeared with those photos.
Last week, my friend and her husband came for another visit. My friend’s husband is doing great, so these days Dakota’s job is to create gentle chaos and general shenanigans rather than to provide comfort and snuggles (apparently she is equally good at both). They thought about bringing her with them to explore her old haunts, but decided the 18-hour round-trip car ride might be miserable for her. They brought plenty of pictures and videos to show us, though.
As my friend scrolled through the camera roll on her phone, she kept laughing, “We have way more pictures of Dakota than anything else. We didn’t know we had a Dakota-shaped hole in our lives until we brought her home…now we can’t imagine life without her.”
So, that’s the update, Dear Reader! Not all stories have happy endings, which makes the ones that do even sweeter to share.
