Black Cats, Part 2

If anyone reads my former posts he or she will probably notice that I go back and edit them occasionally for spelling and grammar. I'm pretty sure that I'm just kidding myself with the whole "people going back and re-reading posts" thing, but oh well. Here is the conformation for the hypothetical person who does.


There were kittens born in a box on our patio, bloody and without fur. Once they were old enough that we could handle them my parents and I used to sneak them out of the nest when Mother was away and then give them back to her at night.
Then the kittens started dying. Out of a litter of four, we found one dead one, then another, and then another. The last one to die lived to open her beautiful blue eyes. We had been planning to keep her and had even named her after a mother cat in one of my favorite children's books. One day I noticed she was moving slowly and asked my mother to take her to the vet. To clarify, nothing was visibly wrong with the kitten, and kittens do simply die, as is the way of nature. Another day, we looked in her box and she was not moving at all. We rushed her to the vet, but it was too late for the poor thing. Apparently since the kittens had been born in December it was too cold for them to survive. I still remember how their heads rolled when they died, back and forth, unlike the way a living kitten would move.

Spring came, Mother was in heat again and the same scene repeated itself, sex and all. More newborn kittens, another litter of four, arrived in a box on the patio. There was a black and white one who's name I can't remember, a fluffy one named Cuddles, another fluffy black kitten who's name I can't remember, and the runt of the litter, Snuggles. The unnamed black kitten died. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun with the other babies, putting them in shoe boxes, giving them baths and then watching Mother nurse them each night. Mr President sometimes came by to visit the kittens. I wanted to keep Cuddles because I was convinced he was going to grow up into an enormous, cottony kitty, but we ended up keeping Snuggles, the quietest of the bunch, because he developed an eye infection. My mom always said that Snuggles never gave her any trouble at bath time, but Cuddles would complain loudly. Either way, the decision turned out to be a very good idea.

Once the kittens were all adopted, Mother went into heat and had happy time with Mr. President again. But this time we didn't find any kittens after the appropriate amount of time. My dad said that he was glad that we could wash our hands of the matter, but my mom and I were not so satisfied.
Then, one day when I got up to go to school, I came down to find a tiny, short-haired black kitten sleeping in a shoe box. Apparently my parents had gotten up to find this little rascal with Mother and Blackie standing behind her, Snuggles, Muffy, and Fluffy, Muffy and Fluffy being our two elder cats, staring through the door, watching her bawling to get in through the glass. My parents happily obliged. Her name was Naughty Katy.

Mother transferred a couple other kittens into the yard, but we knew there were more. We finally figured out that they were in our next-door neighbor's backyard, then broke and entered to remove the rest of them. One of them, a kitten I would later name Blueders, scratched my hand in the process. This was a litter of seven, with a beautiful, longhair, loudmouthed calico in the mix. We creatively named her Calico.
Stay tuned for part 3, which won't be nearly as long!

This is Snuggles