Sneaky, Izzy, and The Smurf — A Tale of Three Kitties

Part Three: Izzy and The Smurf Move to Ojai

The Smurf and Izzy - Often on Tables

Author’s Note: I started this series back in 2019. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.

“The house on the corner blew up”, his voice said to me in the message on my cell phone as I was driving on the highway from Encinitas to Ojai in front of Jon, who was driving a rented van with our garden inside it. The year was 2009. It was one week before our official move, and we were transporting this precious cargo to our new home ahead of the rest of our belongings. Jon had become quite the gardener/farmer while living in Guerneville and Encinitas. It was only a 3-hour trip from Encinitas to Ojai, so we decided we could make it a couple of times and bring these beings with us to our new home.

“Take the back way in”, this was our landlord-to-be filling me in.

The back way? I barely even knew the front way.

And wait. What!!!!???? Did he just say that the house on the corner had blown up?

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

As signs go, this one seemed not good.

I called Jon and told him what the message had said, and we laughed and laughed. We figured out “the back way in”. It simply meant driving up the block ahead of ours and back down the side street, taking us onto our block from that street. The blown-up house was at the end we’d normally enter directly across from The Farmer and the Cook.

We unloaded the plants, had some food, returned the van in Ventura (it was a one-way rental), and went to see a show in Santa Barbara with some friends (cause this is what you want to do a week before moving when you’ve hardly started packing).

The following week we somehow, after wrangling with our movers and threatening to fire them and find another company when they tried to mess with our schedule (they made it right, so we stayed with them), found ourselves, Izzy, and The Smurf on our way, leaving the beauty and struggles of Moonlight Beach behind us.

Izzy talked almost the entire drive. Her anxiety kicked into high gear. The Smurf was silent, but when I took her out of her carrier once we’d arrived at our new home, her entire chin fur was soaked in drool.

We unloaded what little we’d brought with us, our moving truck would be arriving the next morning, and we introduced the girls to their new home. They did exactly what they had done when we adopted them and ran around the house inspecting every nook and cranny. The Smurf then flopped onto her back in the middle of the bare living room, asking for some belly rubs. She was not one to do this, so I knew she was feeling anxious. Izzy was doing her usual talking. Talking. Talking. Talking.

We slept on the air mattress on the bedroom floor with Izzy at our feet. In the middle of the night, I woke to find a warm lump by my right hip. The Smurf had snuggled her way into the bed with us. It was the first time she’d ever slept with us. I put my hand on her to reassure her, and she scampered off. Darn it!

The movers arrived bright and early, I was barely coffeeed up, and Jon was still asleep. They were supposed to call before arriving, and somehow that did not happen. I yelled and I mean YELLED for Jon to get up. We hurriedly put the kitties back in their carriers for safety, and for sure, they were not happy about this. I explained to them that we would not be putting them back in the car, it was just a safety measure, and Izzy hissed at me. They had not yet recovered from the long drive the day before.

Before we knew it, the furniture and boxes were in, the movers were tipped, and on their way. One of them was a vegetarian and was excited to be eating down the block from us.

Ojai was a major change from Encinitas. It is much less populated, and we once again had hawks gracing the sky above. I had so missed the Northern California hawks while living in Encinitas. They had abandoned the area as it became more and more densely populated.

Our second morning in our new home, I heard a helicopter circling and saw it was a county services copter.

“There’s a bear in the river bottom!” my neighbor across the street hollered at me. We’d met him the day prior. He had a police scanner. The river bottom is just 5 blocks west of our home.

A few days later, the house three doors down from us was demolished after having been red-tagged. Jon was busy digging up the front yard in the 105° weather and installing the garden that had been waiting there for us in pots for a couple of weeks. Yeah, Ojai gets hot, hotter than anywhere else we’d lived before. I am not a fan of the heat, “But it’s a dry heat”. Sure, like that makes it any better. Plus, with climate change, what was a dry heat back in 2009 has now become a humid sweat box in 2023, but that’s another story.

Blown up house. Bear. Demolished house.

Okay.

Things then quieted down. Rule of three and all.

The person who had originally suggested Ojai to us a couple of years prior happened to be in town that first month we were living here. Her son was in boarding school in Ojai, and she would come out periodically to visit from their home in the north shore suburb of Chicago. She came over with housewarming gifts and took us out to lunch. It was lovely to see her, this touchstone from the beginning of my work as a psychic/medium. I had met her originally when I was hired to read tarot cards for a private party.

She took us to lunch, and at some point, in the conversation, Jon said, “I went to high school with Rahm Emanuel”. He was still Obama’s Chief of Staff at the time.

“I went to high school with Rahm Emanuel!” she exclaimed.

“Wait, What? You both went to high school with Rahm Emanuel?” I shouted.

It turns out they were a year apart, and while never meeting while in high school, they had many of the same connections. They also had met each other more than once in Chicago due to our work, and had not made the high school connection back then. It was only after she suggested Ojai to us and we finally landed there two years later that the connection would be revealed.

Timing. It is a thing. A very, very important thing.

We settled into our life here rather quickly. I had clients on the books within days of moving in, and Jon was busy gardening and setting up his music space. We started to meet people and make friends, and relished the small-town life. Our social circle in Chicago was pretty big, our social circle in Guerneville was also fairly rich, and our social circle in Encinitas was dim by comparison. There were only a couple of people we really connected with there. I hadn’t realized how lonely we were until the contrasting experience in Ojai started to unfold.

And Izzy and The Smurf, well, they seemed right at home. Our little neighborhood in Meiners Oaks is much quieter than the Moonlight Beach neighborhood we had been living in. Izzy’s anxiety began to radically diminish in Ojai, and The Smurf began to assert herself just a bit more in her dynamic with Izzy. The biggest miracle was that Izzy let The Smurf share our bed with her. This was a huge healing for these sweet girls.

Kitty Miracle

The garden started to take root, vegetables started to grow, and The Smurf started hanging out by the front door as if she wanted to go outside.

Front Yard Vegetable Garden

“No, Smurf, you need to stay in,” I’d say. She’d been an indoor cat throughout her life, and we were not comfortable letting her out. She persisted with her requests.

“Let’s just let her out with us tonight and make sure she stays in the yard,” I finally relented.

“Smurf, you can come out with us, but you must stay in the yard and come in when we do,” I said to her as Jon and I headed out. She came right out after us and started exploring the front yard. Izzy watched us nervously from the front door. The Smurf launched herself into a chair and settled in with us once her exploring session was complete.

“Izzy’s out now too,” I called to Jon a few nights later once she finally got up the courage to follow her younger sister out the front door, and in the front yard, they stayed. They never strayed and were only outside with us when we were there with them, never on their own, at least not back then.

The Smurf in Her Element

Gorgeous Izzy

Originally, we had thought that Izzy would be Jon’s music cat, and The Smurf would be my assistant while channeling. It turned out we had this backward. As I said in part two of this series, they loved us equally and did not choose favorites, but when it came to work, they knew their assignments. They came to us at such a rough point on our journey, financially and right after the loss of Sneaky Le Boo, that each of us always had one of them with us.

The Smurf demanded that Jon let her into his studio late one night in Encinitas, soon after we adopted them. She became his nightly companion while he stayed up late working on new music, meowing loudly outside his door to let her in, so much so that he started leaving his door open so she could enter and exit at will. She was almost always to be found there with him after midnight, curled up in the blue chair we’d bought from IKEA many years prior.

Izzy would curl up on the couch next to me or hang out elsewhere in my office while I channeled. She would get in bed with me at night, as I always went to bed before Jon did, while The Smurf kept him company in his room on the lower level.

This pattern continued in Ojai. Every once in a while they would change it up, and I would be elated to see The Smurf already in my office as I was heading in for a client or Izzy would barge (she was a barger) into Jon’s room, demanding his attention, but most often during working times, Izzy was with me and The Smurf with Jon.

In the evening, while watching TV, Izzy was always with us both on the couch, and The Smurf would hang by herself nearby. She always needed a lot of physical space around her. She was never really fully here, fully embodied, more in the faerie realm than here, which is why she enjoyed the garden to the extent that she did, and the music. Izzy, however, she was a people cat, Pleiadian that she was. The Ps have a social quality to them that is always very evident to me.

Izzy would start on the couch between us and then move into one of our laps, and then look at the other and start to worry that they did not have a kitty in their lap, so would move to them and then start the cycle all over again. It was so clearly evident that this was what she was thinking about and doing as she would switch back and forth between Jon and me, settling in, purring away, and then noticing the empty lap next to her, the look of concern taking over her countenance.

It was always somewhat of a relief to her when Jon would head off into his space. Then she would just relax into my lap and fall asleep, often taking me right along with her. She was a sleep magician, that Izzy. No matter whose lap she wound up in, sleeping would commence. Her purr was of the loud variety; everything about Izzy was loud in the best of ways. Meanwhile, The Smurf was quiet, her purr barely perceptible, but one would be mistaken to believe that this meant she was any less powerful than Izzy. They were both healers and guides, magicians and love generators, and our lives were immeasurably better because of them.

That first year and a half in Ojai was bumpy and uneven, to say the least. We had entered somewhat deflated and limping after our two-year stint in Encinitas, watching our money disappear, and it would take us a couple more years to even out and start to feel truly as if we were thriving.

“I am grateful for having enough in this moment”, was the reminder I would use back then when my thoughts would stray due to my anxiety about money. It’s a simple trick to replace the crazy-making thoughts with soothing thoughts that then help one to dig deeper into the emotions underneath, feel what needs to be felt, and release what can be released in the moment. It’s not meant to distract from the anxiety (or whatever emotion is running the show); it’s meant to prevent the self from jumping way into the mud puddle of the shadow side and becoming immobilized there.

The idea in the new age/wellness/awakened community is that our thoughts create our reality. I have never really jived with this. It’s way too simplistic, and my awareness went to the power of my emotions long before the words Law of Attraction made their way to me. However, thoughts do have power and can either feed and exaggerate the harder stuff or take us into a space of ease where deeper healing can occur.

So when the math began to play out in my head, keeping me from falling asleep, I would take a breath and say, “I am grateful for having enough in this moment.”

Today, when the math starts to play out in my head, my anxiety about money is still not fully healed, I take a breath and say, “I am grateful for having more than enough in this moment.”

And I am. Grateful.

Read Part Four Here

The Smurf and Izzy in my Office