mypetstory.mem.com

It was late summer in 1990 when a little gray fluffy ball of fur first appeared at our house. She was a small cat and we first noticed her when she was standing on a patio table on our deck and looking in our kitchen window. I guess she wanted to check out the place before she decided to move in and adopt us.

I was very hesitant to adopt another cat because my last cat had been killed by neighborhood dogs and it was such a traumatic experience that I vowed to never own another cat. My husband, Jerry, can never pass up a hungry animal, so we had some discussion about her. He had never owned a cat, so he really didn’t know how they can become such an important part of your life. Well, after little discussion, we went to the store, got stocked up on cat food, and let her adopt us.

She quickly entrenched herself in our lives. We were gone several days in every week. A young man from out of town who was attending college near us came to stay with us for several months. He became fast friends with this little ball of fur and he named her Dixie. She kept him company during the week while we were gone, and when he went home on the weekends, she kept us company.

She quickly went from starving cat that would eat anything to a picky eater who only wanted certain foods. We cooked whole chickens for her, grilled chicken for her, grilled steak for her, and gave her anything else she wanted.

She made the decision early on that she was going to sleep with us. One night, I woke up and she was sitting on my chest looking at me. From that night on, she slept beside me every night that we were home. Later on, she would begin to sleep on my right arm, snuggled up next to me. It was such a good feeling with the warm little ball of fur next to me.

We moved from the city in 1992 to a home in the country. We were working on the house for about three months before we moved in, so we took Dixie to the new house with us so she could become accustomed to the new environment. She hated it. She would always go to the master bathroom and get behind the commode and stay until we came to get her to take her home to the old house. When we moved in, she adjusted pretty fast to the new house when she found out she had a big deck to sit on to view all her surroundings and lots of land to roam around on.

By this time, the college student was not staying with us, so we had to take her to her grandparents (my Mom and Dad) when we were out of town so she could be waited on properly. She demanded the same attention there that she did at home. Daddy had a certain chair that he always sat in. She decided that she wanted that to be her chair when she was at their house, so Daddy let her have the chair for her own. She also didn’t like for the washing machine to be used while she was in the kitchen at their house because she didn’t like the noise. She could give you a look so that there was no question about what she was thinking.

Dixie had so many unique ways and her personality was also unique. She didn’t like most people and she acted like she didn’t even like us much of the time. She would hiss at us quite frequently and let us know her likes and dislikes. If we opened a closet door, she wanted us to put her on the top shelf. She loved high places. She loved to be on the top of book shelves, the top of the refrigerator, and even on the roof of our other house. She would climb the dogwood tree on the other side of the garage and walk on the roof over to the deck side of the house. Then she would give this little helpless “meow”. Jerry would go get the ladder to get her down. When he would get to the top of the ladder, she would back up so he couldn’t reach her. He would finally get her down, then she would go back to the other side of the garage and do the same thing again. Our deck was very high and she would sometimes jump off to go after a dog that happened to walk across our property. She never weighed over six pounds, but she never hesitated to jump on a dog of any size.


At times, she decided she wanted to roam around in the woods beside our house. We have been late for church and for work many times when she decided she didn’t want to come when we called her. We always imagined her sitting somewhere watching us frantically searching for her. After a while, she would come strolling out like she had been there all along.

She loved to get up with me in the mornings and sit and watch me put on my makeup and fix my hair. She would watch me so patiently while sitting on her little ledge in the bathroom.

As she grew older, she became more picky about the food she liked and Jerry was her choice for trying to figure out what she wanted. She would come and sit by his chair in the den with her impatient look until he quickly got up to go to the kitchen to fill her order. Sometimes it took preparing two or three different little plates of food before he hit upon the right thing. When she saw that he was fixing what she wanted, she would go down to the end of the hall at the bedroom and wait until she saw him on his way to the bedroom with her food. When she saw he was on his way, she would go to her little feeding station on that end of the house and sit there until her food arrived.

One rainy day when Jerry was driving down the road, he saw a little kitten on the side of the road just standing there. He went back and picked up the wet little thing and brought him home. He thought Dixie would love to have a companion to keep her company when we were away during the day. Wrong! She hissed and spit at him so much that he had to live alone in an apartment on our property for about a month until we got her more accustomed to him. He was a friendly little cat that purred all the time, but Dixie wanted nothing to do with him. In the eleven years that they lived together, she never liked him and never had much to do with him. We named him Dusty. Once in a while they would put their noses together affectionately, but then she would smack him on his little nose. He had a lot of scratches on his nose from her because he wanted to be friends and could never understand why she was so mean and hateful to him all the time.

She never did grow to love Dusty, but as she grew older, she did tolerate him a little better. He was about four times bigger than she was, but she would keep him in line. Sometimes when he had had about all he could take from her being so hateful to him, he would just smack her. She would screech out very loud like he was killing her. Then, she would go sit back and watch him be scolded for something that she had instigated in the first place.

There are so many things we miss about that special little girl. She was a very special companion to us for a lot of years and we will never forget her. Her doctor sent us a card with the poem “The Rainbow Bridge” inside after she died. It still brings tears to our eyes when we read it.