spotty

Page Seventy-three

wednesday 10 november 2010 .... turners festers

~~} Bold yellow sun lights the land where you run,
~~} burns so bright all its shadows are black.
~~} You rest in the shade where the danger lies wait:
~~} how long will it let you come back?

He was yet another grandchild of Maman, that mother extraordinaire. I have no picture to show you, but he was a small cat, white with grey patches. Hence the name. And I must have named him in a period of great fatigue, because I usually came up with names slightly more original than Spot. That's as bad as Fido or Rover. But most of my animals had multiple nicknames, and for him these were: Spotty, Mr. Spock, Spocky boy.

Like everyone in his family, Spotty was a home boy. Even when free outdoors, these cats never strayed very far from home, unless something really out of the ordinary happened. And the family also tended toward smallnes, which in the case of Spotty's litter was smaller still. None of the six ever got to what you'd call a normal size for an adult cat, and I think this might have been because their parents were half-siblings.

Sixteen years after his death, I still sadden to say that his life was a short one. In the debate between indoor-cat and outdoor-cat, there are good points on both sides. And I have argued the question within myself thousands of times over the years. In most times and places, I opted for outdoor cats. And the indoor people can rant and say that I'm wrong, that I shortened my cats' lives by letting them go outdoors, and in the latter point they are correct. But I had reasons, reasons which I consider just as valid and well-considered as anything they can say, for deciding on outdoors. Not going to elucidate them here, as this is supposed to be Spotty's post, but maybe I'll go into them somewhere on my website, at some future time.

Two years and three months was the amount of time he lived. A short time, but a happy one. He was happy. The dark cloud in his life was the cat next door, a particularly aggressive tom called Skip, who would come to our porch and beat on Spotty, who was only half his size. I tried not to get TOO furious with Skip, because he belonged to people who didn't take very good care of him, and I think this contributed to his generally unhappy nature (he belonged to the same crowd that Rabbit did, and they didn't take much care of HER either). But I did get SOMEWHAT furious when I would hear snarls and shrieks from Skip and Spotty's very unique, loud hum of terror coming from the porch. We all know the expression "scared shitless." This is what happened to poor, timid Spot every time Skip came to the porch to assert dominance. I'd rescue him, of course. And as I've said, this was the only dark cloud in Spotty's otherwise happy life.

read... Shadowpoems... Extemporaneana...

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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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