Barn Cats

From the time I was five until just before my ninth birthday, my family lived on the farm my grandparents owned.  We lived across a corn field and pasture from them.  There was an old barn in our yard that at that time was just a hay storage facility.  I remember spending entire days with my younger sister crawling up and around the mountains of hay.  It wasn’t only a popular place for us.  There was a small population of barn cats that could usually be spotted by opening the barn door a crack and looking for little pairs of glowing eyes.  Anyone familiar with barn cats knows that easily spotted in no way is synonymous with easily caught.  Sometimes when we’d finally make it into the house after a long day of trying our level best to force a cat to sit docile and purring in our laps, we wouldn’t know whether more of the scratches covering 90% of our exposed flesh were from the cats or the hay.

 

Barn kittens, though, are an entirely different story.  Every so often we’d find ourselves towering over a petrified kitten in a corner and be quick enough to snatch it up before it regained feeling in its fuzzy little legs and took off.  Sometimes, if it was young enough, the captured kitten would surrender to our petting and cooing and actually enjoy itself for a while, but most often it would make a successful break for it after only experiencing a few minutes of our eager affection.  I should have been surprised, then, to find a kitten one sunny afternoon lounging in the sun rays coming from the window in the lofted area of the barn.  It didn’t run or cower.  It just laid there content to be warmed and cozy in the hay.  I sat down next to it and started petting it, which yielded audible purring.  Victory at last!  I proceeded to spend the rest of that day in the loft petting the tiger striped kitten, naming it, and generally planning out our happy future together. 

 

I didn’t want to go when my mother told me it was time to come in that night.  I wanted to sleep outside in the barn with the kitten, but I was forced to go in and bathe and spend the next 8 hours in my bed wondering if the kitten would still be in such an equitable mood the next day.  As the sun began to shine through the window of my bedroom, I raced out to the barn.  I climbed up the mountain of hay and saw the kitten in the loft just where I’d left it.  It didn’t even seem surprised to hear me coming.  As I sat cross-legged in the hay beside it, though, I realized that it didn’t look right.  I reached out and pet it but it was cold and didn’t respond to my touch.  I knew that the kitten had died overnight. 

 

In my little girl mind, I knew that the kitten had died because it was so sad that I didn’t spend the night in the barn with it.  In my big girl mind, I realize that the kitten was probably sick and didn’t get nursed back to health because of my presence.  Regretfully, it would not be the last thing that I would destroy with my over eager affections.