by Kathy Brasby | Mar 16, 2020 | Cats, Country life, Humor, Stories
A friend recently asked me for advice about bringing a cat into her home. This alone put me on alert since my knowledge of cats is limited to our barn cats plus the kitten we rescued a few months ago.
Since our rescued kitten turned into a friendly but ferocious tiger (read that adventure here), my friend thought she ought to get input on the perfect kitten.
I offered to do the online search for her.
Typing in “How to find the perfect breed of cat” seemed like an appropriate search.
Sure enough, there are scads of cat breed selectors online. Okie-Dokie, I jumped right in.
The first question asked, “How energetic would your ideal cat be?” After our rescued kitten adventure, I opted for a relaxed vibe.
Next up was how vocal would this ideal cat be? I could visualize a cat howling on the backyard fence, so I choose rarely makes a peep.
So far, so good. On to personality traits. Hmmm, I thought my friend would enjoy calm and affectionate.
I also thought her ideal cat would like a mix of social time and alone time, so I checked that box.
My friend didn’t want a long-haired cat with all the loose hairs and she wasn’t interested in grooming much. I chose rarely or never on the grooming thing.
With anticipation, I clicked the button to reveal the perfect breed.
Sorry, no match was found.
So there’s no short-haired cat who is quiet, calm, affectionate, and can hang out alone or with somebody. I should have known.
I had to tell my friend that there is no perfect breed for her.
She didn’t fall for it. She’s not taking our little tiger anyway.
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 16, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
Navigating what a child says is sometimes like wandering through a corn maze after dark. It’s a little spooky and easy to mistake a corner for a dead end. Or vice versa.
Here are a few examples. This is strictly a no-name and sometimes changed-gender report for protection (mine, so I don’t get hammered by an adult child. They don’t always think these memories are as noteworthy as I do.)
I was showing a two-year-old boy around our barn. We had some black-and-white kittens tumbling around bales of hay.
“What do you call those?” I said, pointing at the kittens. I wanted to teach the difference between cat and kitten.
He stared. “Penguins?”
Another time, I was fixing dinner for the family when one of our kids wandered into the kitchen.
“What’s that?” he asked, studying the pan on the stove.
“Hamburger patties.”
He tilted his head. “Can I call it sook?”
Yep, he ate sook for supper.
On a similar note, the same kid helped me bake muffins one day. I used a whisk to mix the ingredients, and soon the batter stiffened. He lifted the whisk with the flour and sugar and oil clumped onto it.
“Look, I have a lunk!”
He ate quite a few lunks after they baked.
Another day I took a little one shopping at the local drugstore. She carried five pennies into the store and laid them on a shelf for some unknown reason. After we left the store, she discovered her loss. Of course, we had to backtrack in search of her loot. We searched up and down aisles, especially shelves at five-year-old height, but could only find four pennies.
I finally laid the law down. “We need to go.”
Her shoulders slumped as she shuffled toward the door. “I’m going to miss that penny.”
There was the child who came to her mother with her head hanging low. Kids never take disappointment lightly. She wore her sadness like a wet raincoat. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
Uh-oh. Wouldn’t you imagine broken lamps or flour scattered across the kitchen? Maybe the dog lost in a sea of bubbles in the bathtub?
“I’m sorry, Mom, but I can’t fly.”
How did she figure that out? It’s better not to ask.
Then there was this discussion over scrambled eggs at the breakfast table. Fork in one hand, my son asked, “Do you know what a Gurgler is?”
I like to encourage investigation, but I had to admit my ignorance.
“They’re a machine that sucks down people and things,” said the young one.
“Yuck,” I said.
“I hate to tell you this, but if you meet one, you’ll die.”
“Oh, no!”
“But it’s OK because they live on the other side of the world.”
“Good.”
“Mom,” he said. “They’re on the movies.” He rolled his eyes while I wondered what movies he’d been watching.
Then came the day when the same kid rushed into the kitchen, his arms flailing and his face red and hot. “Mom! Betsy says I’ll get wigworms if I drink my potty!”
Um, I can’t even unpack that statement. What would you say? I said, “Then don’t.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 18, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor
Many years ago, I was a country woman who was milking goats, feeding out bucket calves, and raising kids.
My husband had constructed a nifty room in our barn with a door that closed tightly, allowing me to heat the room and keep out all the barn cats. Barn cats get addicted to freshly squeezed milk and make themselves a leaping, milk-seeking nuisance. I kept them out, or they were all over the room, even trying to dip their paws in the milk bucket.
Photo by Remmington Wanner on Unsplash
This particular morning, I entered the milking room with my four-year-old daughter and brought in the first milking doe. My daughter perched herself on a large feed box.
I had just started squeezing out milk when my daughter said, “Mom, there’s a cat back there.”
Ugh. There were not supposed to be any cats in that room. If a cat got trapped in the room, it couldn’t get out. How long had it been there?
I was afraid to ask. “Is it dead or alive?”
She studied the gap between the box and the wall. “Dead. Can I pick it up?”
No!” Good grief.
My husband always seemed to be working 40 miles away from home when these ugly situations came up. It sure would have been nice to turn that dead cat over to him. But, no, I was home alone.
Well, me and a curious preschooler.
“Leave it alone,” I said before she got any more ideas. You need to understand that this girl had once gone with me when I had a baby goat autopsied. She begged the veterinarian to let her watch the procedure and nearly got her nose cut off because she peered so closely into the body.
He was willing to show her the location of the lungs, the stomach, the liver after she asked a tumble of questions.
My point? This girl wasn’t traumatized by a dead cat.
I toyed with the idea of leaving the project for my husband, but I really didn’t want that dread hanging all day long. Besides, my daughter would probably want to sit with the dead cat until her dad got home.
Better get it over with. I finished milking the goat, took the milk into the house, and gathered my supplies. Trash bag. Check. Hand sanitizer? Face mask? Gloves?
I marched back to the barn with my little girl hot on my heels. She wasn’t about to miss this next step in her veterinarian experience. What a kid.
I leaned slowly over the feed box, my breath wheezing through the face mask. I had put a mask on my daughter, but she had slid it on top of her head. Sigh. Next, she’d be snapping the rubber band between her fingers. Not too concerned about this mess.
I was more concerned. I did not want to see roadkill in my milking room, but I finally focused my view into the gap.
There, tattered and soiled, munched and bent, was a purple and white stuffed cat toy.
She was right: it wasn’t alive.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 14, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor
We have adopted a tiger.
By tiger, I mean a 3-week-old abandoned barn kitten, of course. We’re not big cat people, but we couldn’t let the little thing starve to death. So we took her in.
Aw, isn’t she cute? Calm? But get ready…..
I scooted to the pet store for a small animal bottle. When the clerk said, ‘uh, oh,” I should have realized that was an early alert.
She took to the bottle right away. The kitten, not the clerk. Hang with me here.
We named her Panda because she was black and white. And it sounded like a cute, calm name.
The first week, after rescuing the kitten from starvation and the elements, I fed her several times a day, and she’d purr as I held her. Well, she’d purr as she stared deeply into my eyes before biting the end of my nose. So cute.
I’m trying to learn kitten psychology and have since discovered that kittens are really micro-lions. They hunt. They attack anything that moves. They have teeth like needles. Cute.
But I have questions. Panda is now 9 weeks old, meaning she’s big enough to run up my leg, over my shoulder, and on to the top of my head where she sits down and bites my skull. I guess I look like prey.
Panda lurks behind a half-closed door, body pressed low to the ground, and leaps onto my ankle, which probably looks like a giraffe leg to her, sinking her teeth deep into my bone. Brave little hunter.
Apparently, an empty toilet paper roll resembles a T-bone steak based on how she prowls around it. I’m not sure what that says about my ankle.
And there was that dangerous shallow box on the floor by the trash can. She leaped into the box, and it moved, so she kept batting it and biting the edge. Better that box than my head, I thought, so I settled in to watch. After the batting and biting stopped, she laid down in the box and started purring. Is that box prey or a bed? I’m trying to learn.
Panda can spring onto our bed with a single bound, which must be necessary for a professional hunter. I want to understand why hunters need to hurdle onto a bed, but, for now, I’m staying with the mountain-climber explanation: because it is there.
From calm to this… in an instant. Look out, earlobes! There may be tooth marks there soon.
She kinda miscalculated one of her bed leaps, though, running into the side of the mattress and ricocheting back to the floor. She got up and looked as nonchalant as I did that time I nearly fell on the ice. Nobody was looking, right?
I’ve made the mistake of wearing shorts in my own home, which means my legs now have micro-slashes thanks to our tiger who knows the best way to the top of my head is up my leg, whether I’m wearing jeans or not.
Friends want to stroke her head. “Ah, isn’t she sweet?” they coo.
Well, not always. They’ve left our house with apologies and a fingertip missing. It’s tough to pet a hunter.
We named her Panda but, watching her in action the last few weeks, I’m wondering if she’d be better off named Panther.
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