I'm Exhausted, Let's Talk About My Cat(s)

This is definitely his best picture to date

The Christmas holiday has come and now gone and I don't know about you, but over the last two days, I just plain ate too much. It was glorious. However, after an eat-fest of those proportions, well, I couldn't stomach (pun intended) talking about food today. So I wanted to talk about a little someone who lives with us--mainly under the bed up in the lining of the box spring--my cat, Mr. Blue. 

If you didn't know that I had a cat, it's probably because I don't talk about him on my blog. But to talk about my [awesome] cat, Mr. Blue, I feel obligated to tell the tale of his sister as well, Banana. Get cozy and all ready to hear a tale of two kitties.

Way back when (in reality just over 8 1/2 years ago) we first moved into our farmhouse, our friends used to come and live with us every summer--Emily and Eliot. The first summer they came, Emily was positively obsessed with getting a kitten. She found some in the paper, and when she said she was going Daren sent me along to pick out a kitten as well. Daren said every farmhouse needs a cat to kill mice, and well, since Emily would be taking hers back to Maryland at the end of the summer, we needed our own.

This is the "don't flash that flash in my face again" look

When we got there, these kittens were living in kitty cat squaller. It was awful. I quickly realized, though, that Emily and I had completely different ways of picking out cats. Me? I looked into that box of crusty kittens and I picked the biggest one. Emily? Well, she looked into that box and took the scrawniest most pathetic one. Armed with our new kittens we went home and named them. Her runt was Banana and my really manly awesome cat was Mr. Blue.

Finally, I caught him catnapping 

It wasn't too long until we realized that their sizes were not their only difference. Mr. Blue was more reclusive. He was his own man. Banana? She was as crazy as a loon. She was always getting into trouble by doing things like batting at pots of boiling water or sleeping in the dryer, which almost ended really badly. When we caught her playing in the toilet, well, that was doozie, but that was Banana. But when Emily left without Banana that summer, well, something had to be done.

That was when we decided the two cats should be outdoor cats. Mr. Blue? He loved it--he bear climbed up trees and was rarely seen for years. Banana, though, would not accept her fate as an outdoor cat. She was simply not made for the outdoors. She would cry at the door for hours and her meow sounded eerily like "mom." Anytime I let her in, she hid and refused to come out.

After a few years, Banana started disappearing for months at a time, and I suspected she had found what she was always looking for: an indoor family. Eventually, she stopped coming back altogether. That was when I started trying to coax Mr. Blue to come inside. Maybe it was that I felt bad...or maybe it was just that I liked Mr. Blue better....I was skeptical, of course--Banana's misbehaviors over the years made me wonder what tricks Mr. Blue might pull.

He hasn't pulled any. Well, that is, unless you consider sleeping under the bed a trick, or the occasional spooning session with my dachshund. He's house trained--he meows at the door to go out--and curls up next to me on the bed and purrs while I type away on my keyboard. Mr. Blue is a rough and tumble kind of cat who does what he wants when he wants. He's afraid of our toy train around the Christmas tree. He's a huge tomcat now and he kills a ton of mice because he's hardcore like that.

No, Mr. Blue is not a crazy Banana, though every litter likely has one... but he is my cat, and I am glad we getting on together in these ways. I enjoy his company. I like to think our relationship is mutually beneficial.

I am reminded when I am hanging with Mr. Blue, of a bumper sticker my husband once saw on a truck that contained a vast amount of metal scraps, "Happiness is loving a cat."