. . . and so I called her Mowgli.
This was her favorite spot, from which she could keep an eye on me in the kitchen, in the hope that I was working on a plate of food for her, and bask in the sun at the same time!
Mowgli was the runt of a litter, born under a backyard deck in Illinois in the spring of 1993. When we bought the house next door to it in the summer and the lady of the house discovered the existence of the kittens, it didn't take long for a trail of food left from the neighbors' deck to ours to produce a fast friendship between us and Mowgli and her remaining sister, Cal. They spent their first winter outside, spooning by night in a little Dogloo I retrofitted with a 100 watt light bulb and some cedar bedding.
Cal was quite inquisitive, a beautiful tortoise shell in greens and blacks and browns. But her curiosity got the better of her in May of 1994, and she didn't make it back across a road one fateful weekend. Mowgli, on the other hand, was a natural survivor. She always hung back, watching, evaluating. And when she was sure of us, it was only natural that she joined the family, even though Little Sheila wasn't too happy about it. They never did get along all that well. But that was ok, because Sheila, a classic cream and tan Turkish Angora, printed on the lady of the house, who is blonde. So Mowgli sort of became mine, and she and I spent many a happy evening together, usually in front of a fire.
When Sheila couldn't go on any longer almost two years ago, Mowgli became the undisputed queen of this castle, once and for all, and took to the role instantly. It was going so well I had forgotten how old she was getting. In truth I didn't want to think about it. It was 17+ years. We, like others, had lost so much in so small a space.
I tried to tell myself Mowgli had lots of time left, but she didn't.
"There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his prey." -- Alexander Smith, 1888
And so she is gone, buried next to Little Sheila on Saturday, the 29th of May.
I open the kitchen cupboard and am startled when I reach up to see so many plates stacked so high in the corner, the little ones from which she used to eat every evening, unused. From her spot Mowgli could observe this motion, repeated thousands of times, and be roused instantly from her leisure with every certainty that something good was about to happen. But now it is for me to consider how in this motion, so oft repeated, I . . .
"have passed weeks, months, and years which are now no longer in [my] power; that an end must in time be put to every thing great as to every thing little; that to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be vain; the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past."
-- Samuel Johnson, 5 April, 1760
