Remembering Lewis

Lewis left us on August 11, exactly 19 weeks and 6 days after his best friend Colby left us. My mom had to fill me in on history to understand why this is important.

Lewis came to my family long before I was born. He showed up in early September, sometime around the Labor day weekend. Colby arrived at our house before I was born too, but I was told it was just about exactly 20 weeks after Lewis arrived. When Colby arrived, all the kitties ran and hid. Lewis ran right to her like he already knew her. They were best buddies from day one.

Lewis was known for being a bit of a neighborhood bully, a king in his own mind. He fought off neighborhood cats fiercely, but he preferred to scream at them very loudly in order to avoid the fight. He always was misplacing his collars and tags and he rarely wore his "Lewis" tag. He went under an alias much of the time because my mom always made sure he left the house wearing some sort of id, even if he was under the assumed name of TS Eliot or Scrapper John.

Even though he was a bully, he had a major soft spot for me and my momma, and we washed him all the time. We promised to keep his secret of being kind and sweet from the other neighborhood cats to maintain his image. He also didn't want word to get out that he loved burying himself in soft blankets for an afternoon snooze. He loved sharing a carton of yogurt with my dad.

I guess looking back with my mom at the calendar it's no surprise that Lewis left us just shy of 20 weeks after Colby left...almost exactly the same amount of time he had with the family before Colby arrived. They were connected. Kind of like my momma and me but different.

Colby and Lewis are together again, chasing squirrels forever.

Remembering Colby

I said before that this has been a year of saying goodbye to way too many of my friends and family. Colby left us on March 26th. She was 14 years old and she had cancer.

My mom and dad told me that when they adopted Colby she was 6 years old. She was at the Humane Society. They went to look at a different dog, but when that didn't work out they asked if there were any dogs that got along well with kitties. Yes, of course they were told. Go visit "Jake" in cell block 33. Off they went. There was Jake all exited to see them. He was jumping over the top of the other dog sharing the space. Out came "Jake" so they could meet. Love at first sight. Then "Jake" rolled on his back...and mom and dad figured out this was not "Jake"...it's a girl. Who is this dog anyway? It was Colby, the 6 year old Shepherd/Husky mix, who was a fence jumping, cat chasing, too much to handle dog. We think of Jake and hope he got a good home.

When you fall in love in the first 30 seconds you meet, mere words on a page accusing a dog of all sorts of bad deeds isn't enough to keep a dog like Colby from coming home. Mom showed me the rap sheet. Colby came home and promptly chased the kitties and jumped the fence....all bad deeds that were soon stopped with a bit of love and patience.

Colby loved all of us kitties, and she was really good to me when I first arrived and she could have stepped on me and ended it all. She took great pride in babysitting us when mom and dad were gone. Colby didn't bark unless it was really important. She communicated by squeaking her talking toys. She had a different toy for every mood...there was froggy and duckie and monkey and fishie and even a little school bus. She loved riding in the car. I'd sometimes wonder where she was and mom and dad would tell me that she refused to get out of the car because they didn't go enough places.

She loved me and my momma. We loved washing Colby.

She was a little sick for a couple of months, then she got much worse. In one day she went from being able to stand up on her own to my mom and dad carrying her around. My momma stayed right by Colby's side until the very end.

Colby's best friend in the whole world was our brother kitty, Lewis. When Colby first arrived I was told that she chased squirrels and barked at them. They wouldn't come close to her. Lewis taught her how to hunt those pesky squirrels by teaching her how to stalk them like a kitty stalks a bird or a mouse. They would spend hours together in the back yard stalking them. Lewis passed away shortly after Colby did. They say he had cancer too, but I'm pretty sure he died of a broken heart. I'll write more about Lewis later.

I miss my Colby a lot. We now have Grete living with us. Colby would be glad we gave another needy dog a home, just like we did for her. I'm a bit sad because I'm missing Colby and I'm worried about my Grete who will be going in for surgery very soon. It's sometimes a bit much for me. I console myself with singing to boot socks in the middle of the night.