She came home with me that day.
She buzzed around that apartment like a calico tennis ball with a slightly bent pipe cleaner sticking straight up in the air. She never really befriended Mittens, but they tolerated each other.
At first she resented being dragged from The Only Home in Knoxville to Indianapolis, but she came to terms with it. She went from being standoffish toward Bobbi to sitting next to her on the futon and cuddling a little to, here in the last year or so, preferring to sleep nights curled up in the crook of her arm.
Over the last year, the progression of chronic kidney disease, bane of elderly cats, started catching up with her. She'd get dehydrated, nauseous, and stop eating. She'd be taken to the vet and be given subcutaneous fluids and a vitamin shot and it would perk her up to where she'd be acting like her normal self again, but the episodes kept coming closer together. First in January of last year, then again in July, then again in October, January again, and finally this month. She was always a good patient and the vet techs fussed over her and praised her for being a trooper.
This time around she couldn't shake it off and I just couldn't bring myself to force her to fight anymore. She stopped eating days ago, and started refusing water yesterday morning. It was time.
Good bye, little Miss Rannie. You were a very good cat for a very long time. I choose to believe that there's some place for good little cats with plenty of slow mice, lots of toys to sing to, and no annoying bigger cats to pester them.
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