Everybody, give your pet a hug for me, okay?
Miss Boots, the cat that made dogs five times her size tremble in fear.
1994-2011
May she find a sunny spot to nap in, cool dreamsicles to nibble at (she wasn't too crazy about the orange part, but she'd eat it anyway in order to get to the vanilla ice cream center) and someone to scratch behind her ears and against her cheek the way she always liked to be scritched. I'm certain she's already staked out her territory in Kitty Valhalla and is patrolling it just as vigilantly as she did for her front and back yard here.
She was a good cat; she knew when you were happy and when you were sad (she wasn't a touchy-feely sort of feline by any means, but she'd always climb in your lap or butt her head against your hand when she knew you were feeling low) and even when she shredded the screen door or made a mess in the garage (she was known for bringing in field mice and dissecting them in front of the door leading to the kitchen in a "Look what I brought you! I even thought to share!" sort of way) you couldn't help but love her. She was the grouchiest kitty I've ever known who once got so fed up with a neighbor dog peeing on her favorite napping tree that she climbed the tree, waited until the dog came by to do his business, and then jumped on his back and held on like a burr. The dog never peed on her tree again. Actually, the dog would often cross the entire street when it got to our house, walk a little ways away, then cross back onto the other side of the road completely. He'd do that on the way back to his place too.
I got her when I was twelve and she was just a little black and white fluff of a kitten someone had found in a dumpster in Austin. She survived floods, Hurricane Claudette (she hid under my bed the entire time), a nasty summer when we had snakes come out of the woodwork in our area, mean stray dogs (I think she actually took one on - I found it wandering the neighborhood later with a nasty claw gash across its face) and a variety of other things that probably would have spooked other cats, especially outdoor cats, away. One of her favorite things to eat was canned tuna straight out of the can, bacon, and the above mentioned vanilla ice cream. She was my little shadow wherever I went around the house and loved to go on car rides. She'd normally climb up on my headrest and cling on while I drove; the Wenchmobile still has claw marks from the last time she perched up there. When she wasn't inside my car, she was on top of it, leaving little skid marks on the windshield from her paws when she slid down from the roof to the hood.
I know that she was old, but it doesn't make it any easier to say goodbye to her. I went over to Mom and Dad's yesterday and I knew that she wouldn't be around for very much longer. Mom had said that she had been sleeping almost constantly and that she had stopped eating and only drank a few swallows of water. Boots had taken to staying in the guest bathroom, which was the one place in the house that she used to avoid like the plague. When she was younger and it was either too cold or too hot outside for her to sleep in the garage, we would let her stay indoors, but just so that she wouldn't wander the house while we weren't keeping an eye on her, we put her bed in that bathroom. She would freak out and eventually manage to jimmy open the door by sticking her paw underneath and jiggling. Even when we made the smallest motion of trying to put her in that room, she would lock her legs up and meow like she was going "Nuh uh! No way!" For the past two weeks, she would do the opposite, freaking out when we tried to get her to leave the bathroom.
And even though she was really weak yesterday, she managed to get up and limp her way to where I was sitting on the bathroom floor and put her head on my leg like she always did. She fell asleep there for a while before I carried her back to the little bed we had made out of a bunch of old towels in the corner where she had been staying. The only good thing about this was that she never looked like she was in pain, just that she seemed to get more and more tired as the week went on. She died aronud 3:45 this afternoon. Mom was at the house and she heard her let out a scared sort of meow, so she sat in the bathroom to pet her. She said that it was like once Boots realized that she wasn't alone that she went peacefully. One minute she was purring and drifting off for another nap and the next...she wasn't.
Mom put her in a little Amazon shipping box (she loved to sleep in those whenever something came in the mail for me) with the towels she had been nesting in and Dad and I dug a hole for her in the back yard where she used to like to sun herself. Luckily, the drought we've been in made the digging a bit easier; there were huge cracks in the ground already and the normally hard clay dirt was so crumbly that it didn't take long to make a deep enough spot for her. It was so difficult to put her in there - Mom put her in the box while she was still limp and she managed to situate her in there like she was sleeping. Even though rigor had set in by the time that I got there, I still felt like maybe she was just sleeping. Sealing the box with packing tape was one of the hardest things for me to do.
I know that some people might say "but she was just a cat, get over it already," but she'd been a part of the family for seventeen years, offered unconditional love, and saw me through a lot of bad patches growing up. To me, she'll always be so much more than just a cat. I'm so grateful that I was able to have her as long as I did. She was a unique one, Boots was. She will be dearly missed.