A warm autumn day.  My husband and I were raking away the last remnants of Autumn, and there it was!  The tiniest little sound.  What was it?  We looked everywhere, and there in a pile of leaves was the most adorable baby kitten.  She looked too small to have been weaned!  We took her in the house and tried to decide what to do with her.  We had had so many cats, and sadly, the last one we had to put down.  I swore I would never have another cat.  What I went through with Bob was just too painful.  But this was uncanny!  This little baby kitten looked exactly my precious Bob! 

We named her Angel, because it was as if she fell from the sky, and she gave us so much joy.  It was going to be difficult, she would have to be bottle fed.   She was very picky, but we finally got her nourished.  She decided my husband's shoulder was a perfect place to perch, and looked like a little parrot!  He was a little heavy so she would lie in the middle of his stomach.

We had another cat;  Jack, Bob's best friend.  We didn't know how he would to take to Angel, most cats hiss at a new cat.  But he was very docile, and accepted her with open arms.  After all, he was 16 years old, he didn't have a lot of 'umph' to fight with a kitten.  But she made him come to life when she decided he was a horse.  She loved to ride on his back, and if she was a baby I'm sure she would tell him to giddyup!  Jack wasn't too happy about being a horse and is the one thing that made him hiss at her.

Most of the time we had her in a little bed, but after a while, we let her roam the living room.  She was very tentative and walked very slowly.  Her blue eyes were wide with wonder, everything was new to her.  Then one day, she ran into the strangest thing of all.  I have two desert tortoises.  One just happened to be having his dinner.  She couldn't figure out what it was.  It didn't hurt her, didn't do much of anything.  He was rather large and she was so tiny, she had to examine this 'thing'.  So she hopped on his back.  He just kept eating his leaves and ignoring her.  She, on the other hand looked scared to death.  She wasn't quite sure how to get down, and gave a look like, "How do I get off this thing!"  But she managed and went to her bowl to get a drink.  All this time, the tortoise just kept eating.

There was one thing she loved to do that I thought rather odd.  Whenever I made the bed, she loved to get under the sheets.  Even we went to bed at night she would crawl under the sheets.  We called it 'playing submarine'.  One night she was a little rambunctious and kept going up and down under the sheets scratching my legs.  I got a little tired of it, and put her underneath the clothes baskets.  That would mellow her out.  No, she threw the clothes basket off of her and began doing that again.  To this day, when I make up the bed, she crawls under the covers.

As she got a little older, we knew it was time to get her spayed.  This was the most unpleasant task of all.  After she was spayed, she had to be kept in a room alone for a few days.  The first night broke my heart.  We could hear her cries through the door, and felt so bad.  But then we heard things being knocked down.  This little waif could barely walk, but she was so angry, she jumped all the way up to the bookshelf and cleared everything off!

She's three years old now, sometimes a little nasty and very jealous of any other cat.  But to me, she'll always be my Angel.

                                                        Mary E. Lacey
                                                              2011