Noodle

It's been exactly two years tonight, sweetie. Can I let you go yet?

3/31/96

My kitten turns somersaults with reckless abandon off chairs and beds while chasing calico tails and little gray rats and q-tips and shoestrings and tissue paper and other less visible threats.

My kitten pushes her water bowl with her paw, creating tsunamis she watches with wonder, and then drinks from the puddles on the floor, puzzled when her paws get wet because she has yet to put two and two together.

My kitten kicks herself in the face while trying to include her hind paws in the fun her fronts are enjoying and opens doors ala Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee, jumping at them feet first, then entering smugly.

My kitten is spoiled by my friends, although not, of course, by me, and the floor looks as though a dozen kitten pinatas exploded, releasing untold numbers of baubles and trinkets.

My kitten is a slightly diluted calico, with black and orange splotches on white, with one amber eye and one green, a pink nose with a black blot in the middle and one on each side, and pink and black toe pads, indications of a cheery artist.

My kitten is armed on all fours with sharp little kitten claws which got clipped just two weeks ago for the first time to the relief of my hands and feet, and her belly is pink and downy soft, clear-cut like the hills above Seattle, bearing witness to her recent surgery.

My kitten has street smarts for she was feral and spent the winter of 96 -- the blizzard and subsequent floods -- living in a storm drain with her mother and two brothers or sisters, helped out by the kindness of strangers who dug out the drain and left food and water.

My kitten was trapped when she was four months old by well-meaning folks and released into a woman's apartment, but because my kitten was wild and terrified, not cute and cuddly, she was not wanted so I got a call one Sunday night in January.

My kitten was cowering under closet debris when I arrived and perforated a fingernail with her first bite and a finger on my other hand with her second, but that time I held on, and we got her into the cage, and I had bonded.

My kitten lived in the bathroom and yowled through the nights so I bought earplugs for the neighbors and got no sleep trying to comfort a frightened hostage torn away from her world, and I cried for her pain and mine and for my last cat, dead not quite a year, who left long before I was ready to say goodbye.

My kitten was lonely, said a friend, so I gave her a teddy bear and a clock and put an old sweatshirt in with her to get her used to my smell, but my kitten peed all over the shirt and I laughed because my kitten was nobody's fool... and still she yowled.

My kitten peered out at me with big dark eyes through the slits of her (open) cage while I, during a week's maternity leave, sat on the bathroom floor and read A Child's Garden of Verses and Winnie the Pooh and sang numerous camp songs to her, but I could tell she was not impressed.

My kitten's head was examined and her hind leg inoculated during her first trip to the vet, but the rest of her was tightly encased in the towel we used to pluck her from the Venetian blinds after her vain attempt to escape, and the vet said it might take 4 weeks before I could move her out of the bathroom, and my heart sank.

The fourth morning my kitten sat on the rim of the bathtub, looked me in the eye and meowed, then walked across my lap to her water, and when I turned out the light, she let me pick her up, and she purred while I cried because maybe it would all work out and partly because I hadn't slept the last four days (and was as yet unaware of the three days to come).

My kitten was relocated to the small bedroom that day but freaked when she jumped to the window sill, and I thought, "Oh, swell, now there are two of us trapped indoors where we don't belong", but only one of us was vocal; the other was older, resigned and silent, while the younger yowled at the window for three long nights.

My kitten pigged the entire pillow the next night and purred in my ear, and I was sleepless once again, but I was so proud of her and she was so proud of her that neither of us minded, thus the yowling ceased and we let the games begin.

My kitten had the run of the place within two weeks of her arrival, well ahead of schedule, and I cried when she started walking around with her tail straight up instead of between her legs because she had come so far and maybe so had I.

My kitten cries urgently these days when I walk in the door to remind me of our combination kitten field trials and dressage competition in which my job is to throw a little gray rat which she then retrieves, returning with a proud high-stepping trot, head and tail erect, a vision of feline self-esteem.

My kitten jumps onto the table when I am computing, walks onto my chest and curls up under my chin, leaving me with but one hand for typing, and that one ends up stroking instead because my kitten purrs... then turns, stretches and, heaving a huge kitten sigh, falls asleep with soft kitten snores, her belly up to the gods, leaving me with no hands and the thought that she seems to feel secure.

The Noodle, by proclamation 6 months old today, has trained me well the last 2 months and 10 days, and, I think, will let me stick around which is good, because I have cried enough for one year, and though the telltale marks on my fingernail will soon be gone, I will remember them, for they were the start of the journey.

-- The Noodlemom

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Noodle, 1996

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