I lived in an apartment about three years ago, and one day while out on my back patio I saw several kittens behind my neighbor's sliding glass door, along with two grown cats. They didn't look much older than four or five weeks, and beyond cooing at them and watching them for a bit, I didn't think anything of it.

The next couple of days, I saw them again. Then I started to realize that I wasn't seeing the same kittens or even the same adults over and over, but everytime I spotted them they seemed to be different ones.

Some weeks after that, we saw listings posted up on the apartment complex notice boards for 'cats free to good homes'. The listing was literally two pages long. I remember wondering to my sister if the apartment staff knew that the people in that apartment had so many cats.

Well, lo and behold, the people moved out. When the maintanance workers came in to change the carpet, paint, and get the space ready for new tenants, they found no less than twenty cats left abandoned and starving (there was a space of about a week between the tenants moving and the maintanance guys coming. Why we didn't hear kitties meowing in all that time, I do not know) in the apartment. What's more, in the little storage shed off the patio, they found another twelve.

Most of the cats bolted out into the woods as soon as the doors were opened. They did catch a few. One of the workers took a pair home, and the rest were taken to the rescue. They had the humane society out several times trying to catch the ones that had run into the woods. Some were caught. Others were adopted by people in the complex. One, a little torbie, we saw several times lurking in the trees, but she was too skittish to get hold of.

Then one evening as I came home from work, I found my two younger sisters had managed to catch the little torbie, and had her in the house. Once caught she had just gone limp, not fighting them or trying to get away. She even let them give her a bath with no fuss. They were drying her when I came in. I looked at her big green eyes under that towel and immediately dubbed her Athena, who is the greek goddess of wisdom.

She was about a year old by that point, according to the vet. Her frame was pretty much fully grown but she weighed only five pounds, and was little more than skin and bone. She was terrified of people, and would hide or run whenever you approached her. If you went to stroke her, she would duck her head and close her eyes, as if expecting to be beat. However in all her fear, she never once hissed, bit, or scratched anyone.

She had horrid ear mites which the vet took care of, as well as getting her first shots. She quickly gained weight and started looking like a normal cat.

Not knowing her birthday, I set it on January 1st...this coming New Year she will be four. She is now a very healthy twelve pounds, is one of the smartest cats I have ever had the pleasure to meet in my life, and is my best friend in the whole world. She has gone from a frightened, skinny little thing that didn't make a sound...either meow or purr...in the first six months I owned her, to a if not talkative, at least communicative, doll. She knows her name, tells me 'yes' and 'no' (literally, she can say Yah and No), and is always happy to see me when I get home. She cried when my thirteen year old labrador retriever, her best pal, went into a massive seizure in front of her, and had to be taken to the vet for that last time. She eventually made a new best pal in my border collie Red (who, irrelavently, thinks she's a cat). All she asks for in life is a belly rub, a full food bowl, and to pose as my teddy bear at night.

I could spend forever telling you all about Athena. Theenee. Thunderchunky. Kiddo. Beautiful. Queen Bee. Goofnut. But I'll say only this. Athena is the reason I love cats...and I'm the reason she loves life again.

[ Reply To This Message ] [ Subscribe to this Thread ] [ Show Entire Thread ]