As we all know you can learn a lot from cats. They made us invent the internet, after all.
Our seventeen year old cat Eve has been poorly lately. She stopped eating (incredible!) and stopped drinking her water. She seemed OK for a few days. She still craved a cuddle on the long grass on the back lawn. She got slim for the first time since 1998, though what I call her ‘guts’ now dangled like an old man’s scrotum beneath her.
Don’t tell her I said that.
When the weather forecast for Sydney predicted 40C ahead we knew we had to get her to a vet. They kept her in overnight to rehydrate her and test her vital functions. Needless to say she passed with flying colours. They wanted to keep testing (just leave your credit card with us) but we wanted her home, even – especially – if she was dying.
She not busy being born is busy dying, as Bob Dylan might have said.
We got her home and she moped and licked her shaved bits but then she started eating and drinking again. This week she caught a mouse for the first time in a decade and brought it inside to show us. She pucked it around the warm wooden floor in the sunroom.
‘Magnificent!’ we declared. The poor little dead thing.
‘You’re next!’ she more or less meowed ‘if you take me back to the vet again.’
Lesson learned. But what lesson? Slim down? Rehydrate? Kill things? Live forever? Do what you want to do, be what you want to be, yeah?
She has slowed down a little again now and spends a lot of her time sleeping. I think that’s what she is trying to teach me; fall asleep in the shade. And show off when necessary.
It’s towards the end of another year and I’m blogging off to spend more time rewriting that almost published novel that I meant to use this blog promoting this year. Thanks for reading.
I hope to show you a dead mouse next year.
redsall 