Chapter 1      Moving

Chapter 2      Turf

Chapter 3      Mamma Kitty

Chapter 4      Festus

Chapter 5      Fight!

Chapter 6      Losing A Friend

     I yawn really big and stretch out my paws and open my eyes. I stand up and lean down and stretch some more, back and forth and up and down. Ah! That feels good. Wait. Today is moving day. I jump up on the window sill and look outside. The sun is just coming up and the air is a little cool and crisp; not unusual for a late spring day. I knew it’s spring because for weeks now everything has been waking up and stretching from the long winter sleep. Whenever I go outside I smell new, sweet smells, and when I look around it looks like someone had melted a box of crayons all over everything - there is so much color! Now, the sad brown and grey trees have been dusted with a limey-lemony color. Even the grass has changed from a dried out blah brown crunchy to squishy wet and green and spongy almost like carpet under my paws. I can hear baby birds chirping impatiently for their next worm, and a noisy chattering sound like all the other forest critters trying to all talk at the same time. Everyone was so excited for Spring to finally come!

            Anyway, as we pulled away from the long winding driveway where we had lived for the past year, I can’t say I was terribly sad. I never really felt like I fit in here. You see, I’m from the city and I guess I purred and pounced a little differently from these country cats because they never really accepted me. Oh, they tried, but I think we were just too different; I didn’t understand why they acted the way they did, and they didn’t understand why I acted the way I did. Maybe if we weren’t moving . . . well . . . but we were. So that was that.

            After a while the car pulled into a new driveway. I raised my nose to the air and sniffed a big sniff. Hummm. These smells were different from the forest smells where we had been living for the past year. This air smelled more like the big city air I was used to! I was born in a big city-actually the biggest city in the world-and have always been rather partial to them. Even though, I’ve got to admit, country birds are easier to catch and much tastier! And mice--don’t get me started! I guess I gained five pounds living out there next to the forest what with all the mice and the birds snacks. And well, since I wasn’t a small cat to begin with, I'm certainly not tiny now!

            But don’t get me wrong; country living was no picnic. There were some scary sounds that came from just beyond the fence deep in the darkness of the first row of thick trees; sounds which I, Mr. Big City Cat, had never heard before. The few times I dared to cross the little wooden bridge that crossed the creek, I gotta tell you, I was more than a little bit scared; even though most of the time my sisters were with me, and sometimes my mom and dad. Well, usually only my dad and two sisters came.

            Who are my sisters, you say? Oh, well one of my sisters is a really loud beagle dog named Kelly, and the other is a really fierce little Westie dog named Callie.  Kelly is black and tan and white all mixed up, and Callie, well, except for her black button nose, she is just a ball of white fluff. But fierce fluff. She is one tough cookie! And the two of them together-forget about it! I was never too scared if my sisters were around. Occasionally my mom would join us, but I got the feeling she was a bit spooked by the place, just like me.  It was a different world beyond that fence, and she knew, just like I did, that you don’t always know what’s waiting in the darkness just around that next tree. Well, that’s a story for another day.

            This place, as I said, reminded me of the BIG city. I heard horns honking, sirens screaming, and tires whishing. Yay! We were out of the country! This felt more like home already, and I was not even out of my crate yet!

            Crate you say? What is a crate? Well, it sounds a bit cruel I guess, but actually it’s like a little portable motel room that Dad keeps for me when I travel. You see like most cats, I don’t like traveling. We cats kinda like to stay put unless we are the ones doing the moving, hee hee. So, anytime that I have to go somewhere like the Vet (ugh!) or we have to take a trip ( yuck!), Dad pulls out my little motel room and I just kinda hang out in there until we get where we are going.

Do I like it, you say? Well, I can’t say that I like it, since I do make Dad catch me to put me in there- but that’s more of a game I like to play with him, hee hee. Let’s just say I feel much safer in my little motel room than I do in a big car with all the whizzing and whooshing and moving going on inside as well as outside of the car. Ick! That makes me kind of sick, if you know what I mean. And no one, and I mean no one wants a sick cat, so let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

            As I was saying, as Dad carried me from the car to the front gate, I could just make out the house and the yard through the windows of my motel room. Wow! It sounded like a city and I knew there had to be a busy street somewhere nearby with all those tires whooshing and horns honking and wait, I thought I could head a sirens too. But I looked around. There was too much green. Something wasn’t right. This place reminded me of the country because there was so much green everywhere! Trees and flowers and grass--everywhere!  In a big city, you see, there is not too much room for the green stuff.

            I looked around as we walked up the stairs and into the house. I finally saw the big street full of cars and a few smaller ones too before we stepped inside the new house.  Sigh. I had a feeling I was going to like it here, but as I said, moving is hard on cats. I knew there were probably going to be some pretty tough times ahead getting used to this new place and all the new folks before it felt like home. Sigh.  I decided to snuggle up and nap on it for a while. Everything always looks better after a nap, don’t you think?

You see, not only do cats not like riding in moving cars, but they also don’t like moving to new places either. It’s not that cats aren’t friendly, most cats are, it’s just that, well, cats have what is called “territory.” When a new cat moves into a neighborhood, all the other cats that have been living in that neighborhood have already worked out the “territory” thing. What I mean is,  they have all decided whose yard belongs to whom, and whose tree belongs to whom, and what parts of the street belong to whom. Of course, they don’t all sit down to tea to decide this; they fight it out. Yeah, I said fight! And while I do happen to be from a big city where I used to have to fight a lot, I really don’t like to fight. I’m more of a lover than a fighter really. I like it much better when everyone just gets along and is friendly.

That’s why I hate moving. There will be fighting.  When a new cat moves into the neighborhood, they think the new guy is trying to tell them what to do just by walking around in his own yard! That’s right, his yard. Because if a cat didn’t live in that house before, the yard that goes with the house was part of some cat in the neighborhood’s territory. Well, you can see how complicated this can get. It takes a while for all the fighting to stop, and for everyone to agree upon where he or she can and can’t walk and hunt. Well, on with this story.

            The first serious fight I got into landed me in the hospital for four days. Oh there were other minor skirmishes before The Big One, but nothing a few days of R&R wouldn’t take care of. This fight however, left me with a huge, what my dad liked to call “chibola” right on top of my head!  I think “chibola” must just be a fancy Spanish word for “lump the size of Alaska” or something. Anyhow, I would have only been in the hospital for one, maybe two days at the most, but just my luck, the Friday they took me in was the Friday just before the fourth of July. Since the place was closed until Tuesday, I had to stay until then, whether I needed to or not. Staying in there with all those other sick animals crying and moaning is not my cup of tea. I was miserable, and let’s just leave it at that.

            Mom and Dad are always a bit paranoid and overcautious when it comes to us kids; Dad more than Mom actually. Mom’s mother actually kinda freaks out ‘cause they treat us the same as human kids. Grandma says we’re just animals, and not important like people. She doesn’t come over to visit much and when she does, she never sits down. I don’t get that. I guess she thinks she is gonna get animal germs or something, like we carry the plague. I don’t know. Well, I guess everybody has a right to be different. Let’s just say Grandma and I aren’t on a first name basis and never will be.

Anyhow, as I was saying Dad kinda freaks out when we get sick, like that Christmas when Kelly, the Beagle that’s my oldest sister, had really bad pains in her side. I could have told them why if they’d just asked. When Kelly got into the garbage and starting eating that tin foil covered in hamburger grease I knew we were in for a ride to the Vet. Well, since it was a weekend, they rushed her to the Emergency Vet all the way across town, only to leave her for observation for the night, which she later told me scared her worse than the pain in her side.  Next morning and a hundred bucks later she was home for “recovery.” Heck, she thought she could have spent the entire time recovering at home in the first place. Mom kept telling Dad not to panic, but since Kelly and me are Mom’s step-kids, I guess Dad always feels he knows us a little better than Mom, which is not always true: Mom is pretty darn understanding when it comes down to the really gritty stuff. I guess we are all really lucky to have them both and to have each other. Even if we are all really different and we don’t always get along. Everyone’s not so lucky in this world, I can tell you. I have seen some things in my day that would curl the hair on your toes, let me tell you. But that is a story for another day.