Martha's Tale

As I have mention before in my post The Most Ungrateful Cat That Ever Lived, my family and I had to great pleasure of hand feeding four newborn kittens. This is their story.

Martha has wandered into my mother and aunt`s Bed and Breakfast`s lawn, pregnant, desperate, single, looking for answers, she looked to my family for shelter and solace (did I mention I have a very dramatic imagination?).

Martha soon became a member of the family, frolicking around the meticulous lawn, letting anyone rub her bulging belly.

A few weeks after Martha jumped into our lives she bore her litter in the barn on Muffin’s bed (there will be a story about the famous bed in due course) and there lay four beautiful black kittens. Bear, Fluffy, Hank, and Smudgie.

All was well at the Island Breeze Inn and its charming barn until disaster struck two short weeks after. I was there alone, 15 years old taking messages on the phone and greeting travelers as they came in. I checked on the kittens as we often did, and their mother was nowhere to be found.

I called and called and a few hours later, the kittens crying, desperate for nourishment and their mothers soft warm presence, I found Martha dead in the road. Flies buzzing around her wound she was stiff as a board and unmistakably dead.

I was shocked, but I gathered my courage and tried to give Martha some dignity by carrying her into the yard. Stiff with rigor mortis and cold I was instantly traumatized as this is the closest I had ever been to death. Well, other than the occasional mouse and mole I had to sweep off the front steps that our other cats probably thought was an offer of gratitude, or a warning of something to come, whatever.

I called my mother, my aunt, everyone, someone to come over and help me. I was alone and confused and oh so sad thinking of the poor kittens crying for their mother, but she would never come back again.

My mother called the vet, asked them what to do, and said that a simple mixture of egg, milk, and syrup warmed up and fed through a dropper would be just fine for the kittehs. We fed and fed and fed thouse kittehs for two or three more weeks until they could eat kitten food on their own.

At first it was really exciting, bringing the kittehs everywhere we went. We had this big cylindrical laundry basket we transported them in that zipped and prevented them from escaping. We brought them to the beach, a house party, the Inn, and of course shared them between our house and my aunt’s.

We taught them this awesome trick to follow the dropper and climb up our pant legs to get food. This was okay until they grew up past cute little fluff ball and started gaining weight. Then it became a house hold hazard to stand in one place for too long for fear of having four kittens attack from all sides.

Hank was ferocious for food, and we always had to feed him first and then lock him away so that we could focus on the others.

Eventually we split the brood into twos and we had Fluffy and Smudgie, and aunt took Hank and Bear. Over the years the cats have gone missing or gotten killed. But not Smudgle. Oh no. She is much MUCH too spiteful to leave this earth. She has already outlived her entire family, and will probably grace us with her presence for 6 more years.

To give my mother credit, Smudgie is her cat an only complains about her once in a great while, and pretty much just puts up with her bullshit of waking up the house at 3am every morning and biting everyone. Because that’s the kind of woman my mother is. Loving, caring, and a bullshit putter upper. Love ya Mama.

 

The End :3