Cat Lady

The story of Kiki and Bento

As my husband can attest, once you get a cat lady to talk about her pets, it’s an endless conversation. Little did my fellow WritersBlock bloggers know what they were unleashing when they started writing about their fur babies. So here goes my “meet-cute” pet story of Kiki and Bento.

Kiki (left) and Bento (right) modeling sweaters.

During COVID, I had lost both of my senior cats, Luna and Bijou, within about a year of each other. My husband and I were sad to lose them, but we decided we wouldn’t be getting anymore pets because we were already planning to move to Portugal. We didn’t want to be hampered by the extra hassle of transporting fur family members and the associated difficulties in renting apartments when we moved.

So when the hungry little grey striped cat outside came around and looked at me with its big saucer eyes, my husband warned me not to make friends. But I still had some leftover cans of cat food, I reasoned to myself. Plus, we were trapped in our houses, left to watch the halted world outside through glass windows and it was hard to ignore the poor cat’s plaintive pleas.

And you guessed it. That grey cat hooked me, both figuratively and literally. Behind those sad, desperate eyes and diminutive meows was a feisty ball of fur that started coming to the door daily for food but then would hiss and swipe my hand while I was putting a bowl of food down in front of her. She was a regular cat Jekyll and Hyde. I think she actually took pleasure in drawing blood. But the happiness endorphins, oxytocin, or whatever, compelled me to keep feeding her.

I started to notice her belly was quickly getting big and it wasn’t because of the food. Uh oh. She was pregnant. I’m pretty sure she was already pregnant from the moment we met.

It wasn’t long before four tiny kittens emerged from under the deck of our back yard, frolicking on unsteady legs. We continued feeding mom and watching the adorable antics of her little babies outside. But we were constantly afraid of the other wildlife that had seemed to become bolder during lockdown. Raccoons, coyotes and opossums were sometime visitors and we often heard hair-raising animal screeches of death in the night. I would run outside to chase away the predators, prepared to do battle if necessary to protect the kittens. Fortunately, all four of them remained intact.

Natas nursing her four babies on the back porch.

Due to COVID, shelters and animal rescue organizations were either shut down completely or running very limited services. Most of the ones I called told us they couldn’t help us. But there was one TNR place that was willing to help, and a volunteer I’ll call “Janet,” walked us through what we needed to do. She told us the mother was feral and the only thing to do was to trap, spay and release her. For the kittens, we needed to trap them and then foster them until they were old enough for their shots and operations. She told us unspayed females could have 2 or 3 litters a year. “You don’t want to have a whole cat colony in your backyard, do you?” Janet’s organization would do the work of putting the kittens up for adoption.

Mom was still a Tazmanian Devil, but she was getting comfortable enough to have her kittens come near us and I lined up bowls of food for all of them. They were skittish at first, but the aroma of food overpowered them. The little black one was literally trembling with excitement at being able to eat solid food for the first time.

They were all easily trapped and mom immediately went off for surgery. The first thing we did with the kittens was to give them baths. The water turned muddy brown and I’ll never forget the sight of all the fleas coming out of them. There were fleas coming out of their eyes!

I continued feeding mom when she came back from her surgery and she continued to hiss and take swipes at me. Meanwhile, we tried not to get attached to the kittens. We had to give all of them names for the surgeries—probably some turning-fosters-to-pet-parents psychological tactic. Mom was dubbed “Natas” after a Portuguese desert. The brown one was dubbed “Bento,” the black one was named “Kiki” after a Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, and the two grey ones were named “Bootsie” and “Grey.”

Kittens in their make-shift “cones.”

Instead of buying pet cones as they healed, Janet suggested using paper plates with holes cut out of them. There was endless hilarity, watching them run around with paper plates on their heads! By now, Hubbie had been convinced we could keep one of them. “Just one.” I knew immediately that Bento was the one with her cute poses and little white mittens. Then my husband started getting cold feet about giving up the black one. This avowed dog person finally admitted that he was smitten with Kiki, who was perhaps the most people friendly of the four. So now, we had two cats to bring with us to Portugal, and yes, the transport to a foreign country was just as fellow blogger, David, described it in Familiar.

I can only hope that the two grey kittens have found happy homes in Seattle, as Janet told us, and that the new owners of the house have continued to feed their mom, as they promised us they would. Kiki and Bento continue to bring daily joy, alternately fighting and cuddling with each other. I don’t know exactly how they communicate to each other but Bento knows it’s her job to wake me in the morning by jumping on top of me and meowing until I get up to feed them, while Kiki has the evening shift crying at my husband as if the world is about to end unless food is immediately served. We are the willing servants. In return, we get cat oxytocin, furry followers, lap warmers, keyboard editors and Zoom bombers.

Sister love.