A Tearful Trip to Disney

In 2008, a painfully thin, feral, white tom-cat decided to adopt us.  The next summer, in July of 2009 when we returned home from New York, we discovered that white cat (Mittens) had found a friend whom he thought we needed to feed too.  He was white with orange markings, and very, very skittish.  So much so, that we began calling him Skitter.  He was an odd looking cat, with a flat nose and tufts of hair that grew straight out from it.  Because of his deformed nose, his eyes appeared a little cross-eyed sometimes.  And at some earlier point in time, his tail had been broken and healed well enough that you didn't notice it, but not so well that he didn't have pain if you touched that spot. 

It took 3 months of eating daily at our food bowl before Skitter let any of us touch him.  And much, much longer for him to really trust us.  But sometime over the last year, he really, truly became ours--still roaming the neighborhood like the stray cat he was born as, but more often than not found curled up on our picnic table on the porch right outside my bedroom window, and always seeking out our company the minute one of us walked outside.

While he was still wary of strangers, with us, he had gone from being skittish and timid to being a big love who purred so loudly you could here it from a distance, and who drooled rivers the more content he got.  But much like Aslan in the Narnia books, he wasn't a truly tame cat, and he would not have done well indoors as he never lost his skittishness when it came to loud noises or unexpected motion, which a house with 4 kids is full of. 

He was such a sweet, sweet cat.  But Monday morning, as we were finally getting out of the house and underway to Disney, we came to the top of the road, and there, lying dead in right in the middle of the main road was Skitter.  :-(.  He had obviously only recently been hit, as he had been around that morning for food.  I knew the minute I saw the body that it was him, but of course I had to get out of my car and run to the middle of the road to check.  And sadly, all the kids were in the car and had seen his lifeless form too.  Luckily, he was struck, not run over, so from where they could see him, there was nothing physically "wrong".  But a glancing blow to the face delivered by a car traveling 40 MPH was just more than cat can take.  Thankfully, I think it was an instant death sort of thing, so there was some solace in that.  But there were still many tears shed on our way to "the happiest place on Earth". 

So this is how we'll remember him, always keeping an eye on the homestead...and the chickens...

 Happy to just roam through the grass...especially if it was where the dogs would see him and bark their heads off...

Always such a love...so desperate for the same attention he was afraid of for so long...

But mostly, we'll remember him through his daughter, our special indoor kitty Pumpkin, who you can see inherited her father's "watch dog" tendencies (here watching over Sari where she fell asleep coloring) and his beautiful orange coloring.

Rest in peace big boy--the picnic table seems awfully bare and swinging on the porch swing won't be the same without you.