Minette

Adopted as an adult in 1987
Died 19 Jun 1996

I, Rachel, was the most beautiful cat in the world's lady until June 19, 1996, when my beloved Minette died. I arrived home from work and walked up the front steps to check the mailbox when I heard the screech of car tires. My cat shot past me, as if on rocket fuel. I thought there was no possibility she could have been hit, since she traveled so fast past my legs and off the porch. I began calling her name and went around the corner of the house and down the driveway when she didn't answer me. There I found her lying perfectly still under the canopy of a fallen tree branch. I turned her over and begged her to answer me, but she was dead. It was as if she had simply run out of fuel as she ran, like a shooting star.

Minette already had her name when I met her. She started off her life as a restaurant cat, living in the shady vegetable garden of the establishment where my husband, Mark, worked as a cook. Minette was already a full-grown cat when I first made her acquaintance; some days, as I waited for Mark to get off work, I'd talk to her. She was elegant, aloof; I had to use all my charm to get her to come to me for petting. When the restaurant closed down in May of 1987, Mark brought Minette home to me so that she'd have someone to belong to.

Minette was a black and white cat with perfect black Cleopatra eyeliner around her beautiful green eyes; she had butterfly points at the sides of her face, a longish coat, soft as a bunny's, long white gloves and a little Charlie Chaplin mustache. I loved to buy rhinestone collars for her because she was so beautiful, and she used to prance around as if performing a floor show -- she was quite a Zsa-Zsa kitty. Like her black-and-white counterparts, the nuns, she was a virgin for life. She was a fierce amazon who was perfectly capable of defending herself when made advances upon by male cats in the neighborhood or badgered by dogs. She was a sweet, sweet cat who was always perceptive of my moods and tried always to speak to me. Any combination of the words "pretty" or "kitty" would elicit a series of responsive meows from her. She "faced" with me and gave me rabbit feet and love bites when I rolled her over on her back to play with her, and, during the winter, she slept curled up around my head, like a Daniel Boone hat with her tail hanging down. She loved to make "kitty paws" in my hair as we lay down to sleep each night, and I shared my pillow with her. I was her kitty mother.

Minette was my first baby, our original family pet; during the past five years we called upon her to share her home and her people with a growing menagerie consisting of two birds, another cat and the two boisterous Boston terriers. She was unbelivably gracious to the new animals; she even trailed along behind the two dogs on their leashes when we took them for walks -- a Fellini-esque image of three black-and-white animals walking along single-file, if there ever was one.

She was a bossy cat who told me vocally and with unmistakable body language exactly when she wanted in, out, to be fed and how she wanted to be petted. She had a habit of jumping up on the cutting board when Mark and I were cooking. The sound of the can opener always summoned her from the shady recess in which she napped because she knew the water drained from a can of tuna fish was her treat, and hers alone, never to be shared with the other pets. The dogs taught her to stand upright on her hind legs to beg, and she often joined them in begging for morsels of the dinner I was preparing.

Minette was the timekeeper of our home. It was Minette who summoned us to wake up in the mornings so she and the dogs could go out, Minette who waited at the bottom of the steps amid the pots of geraniums for the car to pull up so she could greet me when I returned home each day from work, Minette who told us insistently it was dinnertime, Minette who scrambled up the front door screen to announce it was getting dark and she wanted in. At midnight, it was Minette who sat outside our closed bedroom door, listening, waiting patiently for the dogs to settle down. Only then, after the dogs had fallen asleep, did she ask to be let in to share my pillow, and only then did I slip off into my dreams.

Minette was the crowning ornament of our home. All of us will deeply miss her beauty and feline grace. Mark dug a grave for her and we laid her where I can keep an eye on the spot from my bedroom window. She's come as close to being buried in sacred ground as a kitty can, since our house is next door to a little white frame church. Minette was my last cat; I will never love another. I am a cat widow, forever faithful to her memory. She was the most beautiful, most affectionate cat in the world, and I was blessed to have been her lady for the past decade. I miss her so much. The pain in my heart is sharpened by my almost certain knowlege that she saw me drive up in the car and was hurrying across the street, in the path of oncoming cars, to greet me.

Sometimes I imagine I hear her voice in the sounds of children playing that drift up to me from the park. I think I hear her voice in the cries of the birds, now safe from my fierce huntress forever, who quarrel in the back yard. If there is a heaven, I know Minette is there waiting to greet me, as she did each day after my long day's work, when I, too, finally return home.