Iocaine Powder

Remember how Frodo would feel his shoulder injury from the Ringwraiths every year on the anniversary of Weathertop?

Well, our cat does that.

Two years ago, on the anniversary of Nanna's death, I ran over the kitten. Somehow she surprised us all and survived. Last year on July 17, she got sick. I didn't think she'd live.

So this year, she disappears. Gone for two days. When she came home, she was listless and weak. She hadn't been grooming herself. Again, I kept waiting for her death. We forced water into her. We couldn't get her to eat. But after a full day of expecting to find a burial spot in the backyard, she began to show a wee bit of a sign of improvement. She asked to go out this morning, and Gary opened the door for her. She was gone all day again. Oh great, she must've left to die in private. But this evening she returned and seemed a little better. She ate something.

Our best guess at this point is poison. I don't know if she found a mouse that was poisoned enough to be so pokey as to be catchable. Or if she got into something somewhere. Or maybe she was drinking water that came from a neighbor's basement, and they'd been using bleach in the laundry water or washing paint brushes in turpentine in the basement sink. Who knows? But it makes me think she's trying to slowly build up an immunity to poison.

Maybe I ought to make a note of it on the calendar for next July, and not worry too much when she seems to have one paw in the grave. Let's see.... nine lives... that ought to mean she'll die in July 2015. Except there were those other near-death experiences when she fell of the piano and hit everything she could possibly hit on the way down, and when she had her head caught in the cord for the blinds. I honestly don't know how many of her nine lives she's used up so far.