LESSONS FROM A CAT: MY CAT SPOOKY.

LESSONS FROM A CAT: The Cat My Mom Calls “Spooky” by Apryl Fox

My mother had always had dogs except for when she was a little kid.

But after she moved, she decided to get a cat.

I told her I wanted a black cat. Now, a lot of people think black cats are bad luck and they are superstitious, but I like differences more than what is the same. My mother looked at all kinds of cats and finally we decided on a cat that we had found on craigslist. We contacted the owner and she sent us some pictures and we agreed that we wanted to pick up the cat. It was located in Lennon, MI, and we drove all the way there. It took about an hour to get there.

The black cat lived in a mobile home park. The owner said that the cat usually spent her days locked in a bedroom. She had adopted one of the other cats as one of her children, but otherwise, she kept to herself, sitting locked up in a room all day, eating and sleeping and getting older.

But we adopted her anyway and we put her in her cage and carried her to the car and put her in the back seat. I sat with her the whole ride home, peering into the cage and talking to her as if she were a real person so she wouldn’t be scared.

Now, on the web site, the owner had said the cat was two years old. But we had learned later on that the cat was actually three. I don’t know why the age was different, maybe the owner didn’t know what the age of the cat was, or maybe she forgot, or maybe she didn’t want to tell us the exact age of the cat. But I guess it didn’t really matter. We kept the cat and on the first day she didn’t want to do anything at all. The second day she didn’t want to do anything at all and she kept herself hidden away in the bathroom, behind the toilet. She was afraid. She wouldn’t come out and play. She wouldn’t eat.

So my mother took her to the vet and she got a shot and that was the end of that. After she got back home she started eating a little but she wouldn’t move very much. A cat is a lot like a person and some people cannot handle change. Some change can be hard on a person-or, uh, an animal.

After awhile we began to call the cat Spooky. She grew accustomed to seeing my mother and she even let herself be fed. Once she hid in the cupboard all day and my mother had to find a way to keep it shut. She even tried to get into the garbage, just like our old dog used to do. I don’t know why animals try to get into the garbage when they’ve already been fed, but okay. That was what my mother had to deal with the first couple of months.

Now she plays all the time and doesn’t sit in the bathroom all day. She has fun and likes treats and she likes to cuddle and get in the way. Much different from the cat we had met at the mobile home park so many months ago who was living in a bedroom and played very little. She was much different.

 So, you see, animals can change, just like people, it just takes time to get to know them and all their little quirks, and you will find out you like them after all.