May 16, 2011

As expected, I find that it is a bit easier each day. Of course, I still miss her a lot and there are moments when something happens that really brings it home again but I am having a lot more moments of fond memories too. Thanks so much for your heartfelt calls, emails and comments and also your prayers. I really appreciate them.

This morning I was looking for something in my night stand drawer and I found about 8 or 10 straws that I had collected there from Miss Zoe. She used to love to play with straws. They were pretty much her favorite toy, straws and pens. The boys have straws and connectors for building structures and they are always missing some when they put them away. Zoe would always find them and have a ball playing with them. I would sometimes give her a drinking straw too and she loved those. She would carry her toys from room to room, following me around, so she could play in the room where I was.

She was also always stealing pens from the husband. He has a basket on his night stand where he puts whatever he has in his pockets when he is getting ready for bed. He always has pens in there and also there are always pens on his desk. Zoe was a little snooper because she discovered that he kept pens in that basket and she was always taking them from there and also from his desk. She sometimes knocked the whole basket to the floor, while trying to steal a pen.

We would come in from being out somewhere and there would be a pen in the hallway and/or one in our bedroom or on our bed. She would carry them to where ever she wanted to play. I picked up at least two pens a day normally, sometimes even three or four.

Here she is, caught in the act:

The reason I had so many straws in my night stand drawer was because she would find one at night, carry it to our bed and start playing with it on top of me. I would wake up, take it away from her, tell her "no no Zoe" and go back to sleep. There was a night or two when I had to take two or three of them from her before she quit bothering me. After that, I made sure the straws were picked up when the boys were finished with them. Even then, she found them on one of the bottom shelves of the bookcase and we had to relocate them to a higher shelf so she could not get them, the little snooper.

She was quite a character and had a wonderful personality. She was a bengal cat, as is my other cat Dancer. They are really a wonderful breed of cats. I have had cats all my life but I have never had a cat like a bengal before. They are really a very different acting breed, as cats go. They are very social and very smart and many people say they have a lot of dog-like qualities. I don't know about that but I do know they are very unique. Some of them have very very soft fur, more like a pelt. Zoe had fur like this but Dancer does not. A lot of them like water and enjoy playing in it, such as in a bathtub with a small amount of water in it or just playing in running water. They are also normally stronger and can jump higher than a normal cat. Dancer used to really like to play with wads of paper.

I spend some time yesterday gathering all of the pictures I have of both Zoe and Dancer and putting them in one folder. Here are a couple of my favorites of Zoe.

She used to love to lay down in this bowl. I would have to quickly clean it out for her or she would use her paw and do it herself. She had not done this in such a long time and then she did it again just recently, after we moved into our new house. She was a funny girl and frequently did things to make me laugh.
Sleeping in the sun, a favorite:

I had forgotten about this until I ran across this picture yesterday. When I had a broken foot last year, she wanted to ride with me on the knee scooter, even if it meant being uncomfortable in the basket.

And this is the last picture I took of her, when she was sleeping next to my bed and feeling pretty bad, not wanting to eat or get up for very long.

I love this picture of her. It is so Zoe and she loved that blanket. I carried her to the vet's on that blanket and she was laying on it in my lap when she fell asleep, before the vet took her away to give her the medication that would put her down.

For those of you who really don't like hearing about my cat, I am thinking this will be the last post about her but I can't promise:). I find it very therapeutic to write down my thoughts and I also want to remember these little things about her. So, I don't plan to write again but I cannot promise that it won't come up. It probably will but hopefully in smaller and smaller spurts.

Today was my first full day of not crying and I was actually fairly happy all day. I'm making progress.