A Pottery Urn for An Amazing Cat
Credence (my gender-neutral child now in their 20’s) and I adopted two cats from an animal pound 12 years ago. We named them Holmes and Watson after our heroes, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.
After my divorce, Credence and I became much closer. We decided the first thing we wanted to do was to have a pet.
We both loved cats, especially striped tabbies. So, we put the word out that we were looking to buy a tabby.
One wintery morning, when the air outside was still misty, one of our friends called us and said there was a tabby at a remote animal pound for adoption, but we had to be quick because the tabby would be put down in two hours if no one adopted her.
Credence and I bounced out of bed, grabbed our coats and drove one and a half hours to the pound. It didn’t even occur to us that we had skipped our morning wake-up coffee.
When we arrived, Shazzie, the lady at the pound said, ‘Oh, you’re too late. The tabby’s gone.’
‘What? But we drove all the way here. Did you put her down?’ I was horrified.
‘Oh, no, no, no. Someone came and took her half an hour ago.’
I was relieved but disappointed. ‘Do you have another tabby we can adopt?’
‘No. But we have a litter of black and white kittens. Come with me. I’ll show you.’ Shazzie marched ahead and didn’t even glance back at us. She was on a mission to find her kitties a home.
Credence and I hesitated. We came here for stripes not black and white. But we shrugged our shoulders and ran after Shazzie.
She took us through areas where they kept stray dogs, goats, chickens, rabbits and even horses. It was bedlam in there. The squawking, bleating, neighing, barking…and the smell.
Standing outside a wire gate, Shazzie turned around and told us, ‘A gentleman brought in a litter of kittens a week ago. The man lives out in the bush. One day, a stray cat came to his back door crying for food. So, he put food and water out for her every day. One day, he opened the back door and there was a litter of wriggling kittens looking just like the cat he had been feeding. That’s the thing. You feed one cat and she repays you with more cats to feed. Anyway, he brought the kittens in. Seven of them. We can’t keep them for long. If they’re not adopted by the end of this week, we’ll have to put them down.”
Shazzie opened the gate to let us in.
I stepped into the meowing cage and locked eyes with a pitch-black kitten sitting high on a shelf. Below him were his six siblings meowing and rolling around.
The black kitten gave me a stern stare as if it was saying, ‘What took you so long?’
I knew in that moment I needed to take this black cat home.
Credence exclaimed in excitement and stooped to play with the six black-and-white kittens.
‘I want this one. Look at him, how affectionate he is!’ Credence was smooching a kitten that had a white upside-down question mark on his face.
That day, we drove home with two meowing, delightful cats in a basket and we named the black-and-white one Holmes and the black one Watson.
Holmes and Watson gave Credence and me so much love and happiness over the years. We’re truly grateful for having them in our lives.
Late last year, Holmes passed. He was 11. We miss him very much. So, I applied my pottery skills to make an urn to hold his ashes.
Watson now lives with me. He continues to be healthy, active and affectionate.
