Tuesday Love Pets Open Comments

Miss Salem passed away yesterday morning. I couldn’t say anything because Aggie Beau wanted to wait until after he got home from work to inform Lovely Daughter. It was hard to wait all day, but I didn’t want to call her at a bad time to give her bad news.

I complained all the time about her yowling, her barfing, and her constant attempts to crawl into my lap while I was working or eating dinner. Quite often we settled for her to snuggle next to my leg, where I’d pet her occasionally while doing whatever it was kept her out of my lap. Now, I can sit wherever I want in peace. Her yowling would wake us up at all hours of the night. She had become quite vocal in her last year or so. The house seems so quiet now.

I remember other pets from my childhood. Boots, our dog who freaked out over the firecrackers and in trying to protect his family from those loud things in the driveway, tried biting them. When that didn’t help, he sat on them. For a very brief time. Then there was Max, the miniature German Shepherd that my father brought home when his coworkers were moving and couldn’t take him with them. My mother used to tell him to “go upstairs and wake up the kids”. He’d come to our room, where I was sleeping with two sisters, our beds parallel to each other. Max would jump on my bed and lick my face until I pushed him away. Max would then jump from one bed to another until we shoved him out of the room. He’d then repeat the procedure with my four brothers down the hall. Jemimah was our first cat when we moved to Pearland. She was possibly the most beautiful calico cat I’ve ever seen. Quite the matriarch she was, she had a dignity that made her very special. I remember how we had to entice her out from under Mom’s bed when she as big as a barrel pregnant and ready to deliver. For a while I had zebra finches, starting with a couple I named Harold and Maude. I didn’t really think of them as individuals, but I came to see their personalities as well as I did in any four legged animal. Maude was the feminist – she’d lay the eggs, but after the first hatching, she didn’t want to sit on any more. Harold was a quite dedicated family man. I remember when I had to clean and boil their basket when they began to layer their eggs. When that happened, the behavior was stopped by taking everything out of the nesting basket and making them start over. When I put the cleaned basket back into the cage, Harold went inside of it and cried for 20 minutes. It was quite heartbreaking. All I could see was the top of his head and all I could hear were those plaintive little peeps. Then he went to town with the nesting material I had put in his cage and prepared to start raising babies again.

Now, I can include Miss Salem, aka “Barf Kitty”, among my favorite memories. Her “glacier move,” where she’d take several minutes of sloooow movements to gradually move into my lap, will be a favorite forever.

RIP, Miss Salem.