Ring Tailed Cat

She was so tiny when she came home. She weighed only eight tenths of a pound and was just the length of my hand. Her eyes were seafoam gray, not yet the cool yellow that they would become. The doctor thought she might only be 3 or 4 weeks old, too young to be taken away from her mother. She was the smallest kitten we’d ever taken in.

She came to us when we were thinking about getting a kitten. Our youngest at that time was Smoke at 10 years old. A friend at work had just adopted a pregnant female and was looking for homes for the kittens. We’d agreed to take one if there was a female in the litter. But that’s not where she came from. Another colleague got up one Sunday morning to find a box of 4 small kittens at the end of his driveway. Someone has left them there, knowing I guess, that he would find them homes. Tina was one of those four. When we were deciding which kitten to take home Tina fell asleep on my leg. The deal was sealed. We went from my colleague’s house directly to the vet. Then brought her home. Four weeks later we brought home Sara, from that first litter of kittens, now we had two very tiny cats.

Tina was so tiny that she hadn’t had time to learn all the social graces of being a cat from her mother. I’d hoped that she would learn from the other three cats that we had at the time. But Sandy took and instant dislike to her, something that never changed. Smoke was the first to adopt her. He remained her life long friend. Thomas was mostly afraid of her at first, but grew to play with her as well.

She imprinted on Edward, since he was home all day. He would leave her in the bed where she would sleep. When she woke she would cry for him, not moving off the bed until she saw him come for her, a behavior she would continue to do her whole life, crying for us when she woke up alone until one of us would come find her, to let her know it was OK to move. She also decided that my ponytail was most like the mother she lost too early, and began trying to nurse there, after first trying Edward’s hair. The doctor said she might do it her whole life. She did. She was confused in 2007 when I lost my hair to chemo, but when my hair grew back, she decided she would sit on the pillow and put one paw on either side of my head, breading first with the left paw, then the right, before plopping her head down on mine and going to sleep as if to be sure it didn’t go away again. I lost count of the number of times I went to sleep with Tina on my pillow, her head resting on mine.

She was often willful and bored quickly with new toys. She demanded attention by scratching furniture she shouldn’t, or the wallpaper, before we took it down. She saw the walls painted and the carpet replaced, the roof redone and the spa removed. In her last days she saw the windows in the house replaced with hurricane windows. If we’d known what was going on we would have waited, to make her last days more peaceful, rather then with the noise and stress that comes with any major home renovation.

There are so many things I miss about her. The times she would greet me at the door when I got home. The way she would plop down on our laps, daring us to move once she’d settled. She would always insist that there was something on our lap to sit on, a blanket or pillow, as if she didn’t want to touch us when she sat on us. Her purr was so quiet that for a long time the only way we knew she was purring was to feel her throat. She never learned to rub on our legs, but instead always went through the motion, only to miss by a few inches. She would burrow into a pile of laundry still warm from the dryer, and swat any items we tried to remove from it to fold. She’d just learned to like butter from our plates after breakfast. Or her claws in my neck as she breaded and nursed in my ponytail at night. What I would give to still feel that.

We lost Tina just 5 months after losing Smoke. Smoke was 19, Tina was only 9. I’d thought that she, too, would live a long life. That maybe she could challenge Smoke for the record of longest lived cat. She’d always been healthy. I thought I would have years with her. By the time we knew there was a problem, we had days. I feel terribly guilty for that. I was able to stay home the day before she died. I’m grateful for that. I hope she knows I love her, and miss her. I hope one day she decides to come back to us. I miss her terribly...

Hidden in the gray of her fur were tiger stripes that you could only see when the light was right. At the end of her tail was ring of white fur. We always laughed that it was a halo, not over her head, but over the other end, which contributed to her willful disposition. She grew from a fraction of a pound to being a big cat, weighing in at 12 pounds. But she was always Tiny-Tina to us. She will always be Tiny-Tina in our hearts... Our ring tailed cat...