Sneaky, Izzy, and The Smurf — A Tale of Three Kitties
Part One: Sneaky Le Boo
She watched us as we moved in, her back leg flung over her neck, grooming herself, sitting in the grass in front of the house next door, the house at the end of the canyon-top road. This was our second move in six months. The first, Chicago to California, took us outside of the tiny town of Occidental, up a windy road, into the redwoods, and onto 3 acres with a pond with geese and a swan. It was a dream come true, and like many dreams, it lacked any sort of practicality (think — no closets or heat source other than a wood stove). A couple of months in and we knew we were going to have to once again pack up and go.
We drove up another windy road, this time outside of the town of Guerneville, and pulled up to the blue house. From the front, it really did not look like much and we both thought, “No”. Then we stepped through the gate, beyond the fence, and onto the huge deck that overlooked an expansive garden dotted with towering redwoods. The house was warm, beautiful, and FUNCTIONAL, and the garage was detached and could serve as a studio for Jon. There was one room on the bottom floor with a cushioned bench set into the wall facing the sliding glass door, on each side of which were 2 beautiful redwood trees, creating a perfect gateway. This would be my space. The house was located in a very small neighborhood, comprised of three streets that wound up and down overlooking Pocket Canyon. It was the perfect combination of quiet without being cut off.
Six months in and we were much more comfortable here than where we had initially landed. The cat next door continued to watch us, suspiciously at times. Like she thought maybe we should not be there, or at the very least was curious about us and yet maybe did not quite trust us. The truth is we had moved into what had been her home. We just did not know it yet.
Our neighborhood was filled with cats. Our friends next door had five of them. We were their caretakers when they went out of town, and two of them, Angel and Melzie, would often come to hang out on our deck. This was perfect for us as we loved cats, Jon and I, but alas were both allergic in a sneezy, red eyes, runny nose kind of way.
Along with the pretty black and brown long-haired kitty with white markings who continued to monitor our doings from afar, the neighbors on the other side of us had two tabbies — Baby and Buster. It was not unusual for them to meet up with Angel and Melzie right in front of our house and rumble. More than once I broke up a yowling, fur-flying todo, more often than not at around 2 am. Every cat in our neighborhood was an outdoor or indoor/outdoor cat with the exception of the people who lived across the street from Angel and Melzie’s house. They had just gotten 2 domestic Bengal kittens (truly beautiful beings) and built them an elaborate catio. As the neighborhood kitty royalty, they did not associate with the rest of the riff-raff.
“Jon, there's a kitty on our deck,” I said, early one morning. “I think it’s that black and brown cat from next door.” She was at the far end of the deck, the side nearest to the house she lived at and farthest from us and our house, the part of the deck that extended beyond the garage (That was an amazing deck!).
“Here, kitty,” I bent down as I approached her. She did not come towards me nor did she retreat. She and I had been doing this dance now for months. I had tried on numerous occasions to befriend her.
“Okay, you can hang out here,” I said to her, and off I went to my room below. Every time I came up the steps she was there, in the same spot. Jon went out to check a couple of times. Same. Right there she was, unmoved.
“Are you sure that’s the cat from next door?” Jon asked
“I think so,” as I found a dish for some water for her.
Later that afternoon the neighbors came by. “Is this your cat?” I asked them.
“Here you are,” the young man said as he scooped her up. “Yeah, this is her. We just adopted a dog yesterday, and the meeting did not go well. We tried to introduce her to him and she scratched the crap out of me and fled.” She squirmed out of his arms and stepped a few feet back.
“But you know, she’s not really our cat,” his young wife chimed in. “She used to live here. When the previous tenant was evicted he abandoned her. We had no idea he’d done that until we found her one day, super skinny and nearly starving a few months after he’d left. We took her in at that time, but she’s not really ours. She’s also pretty old, like 12 or something like that.”
“We’ll take her,” Jon and I said in unison, allergies be damned. They brought over her food and litter box, told us they had named her “Lady”, and left. And we now had a cat. When we moved to California we thought for sure we would get a dog once we were settled. We had just started to look for one, in fact, when “Lady” entered the picture.
We let her know that we were happy to have her living with us and that we would feed her and take care of her, but due to our allergies, she would need to be mostly outside. We had already covered all of this with the neighbors, so this was not news to our new kitty. It was still news to us, however, that she understood every single thing that we thought, said, and felt.
“Lady. Blech,” we both said and started working on a new name for her. “Antares” popped into my head. The Antarians had been instrumental in our healing process back in Chicago, and we felt she was carrying some of their energy with her.
She let us know she was cool with that and everything else by jumping into one of our wicker chairs out on the deck and snoozing peacefully in the sun.
By the next day, she was freely roaming in and out of our house. One of the most expansive aspects of living on a largely untraveled road at the top of a canyon is that you can leave your doors and windows wide open as much as you like, and many of ours did not have any screens.
We’d scoop her up and bring her back outside and a couple of hours later she’d be zonked out on the couch in the living room, or in the basket with the blankets, or on the loveseat in the office upstairs. She was the cutest and funniest thing ever and very quickly worked her magic on us. The only place we did not give her access to was our bedroom, due to the sneezing and the itchy eyes. And she seemed freaked out by the garage. Jon invited her in, but she wanted nothing to do with that space. We assumed it had something to do with the previous tenant who had set up an illegal hydroponic marijuana growing operation in the garage which included the disassembling of the irrigation system in the garden and a rerouting of all of that equipment into HOLES HE DRILLED INTO THE GARAGE FLOOR. (I’m retelling it to you the way our landlady first told it to us). Remember this was back in 2004, long before California would legalize marijuana for recreational use.
The house had sat vacant for at least six months prior to our occupancy. Our landlady was very fearful to rent again after that experience. We went back and forth with her for a couple of weeks until one day we thought we’d drive up the hill to look at the house again and feel it out ourselves. We were also a bit hesitant to say “yes” to it after choosing so wrongly just a few months prior. She just happened to be there. “Oh great!” she said. “Now I can just tell you here that I’d like to rent to you.”
It truly was the perfect place for us at the time, and we realized it actually was vacant when we originally were looking for a home in the Western Sonoma County area. It just took another few months for her to heal enough to list it.
As we got to know Antares better and better we found that the name we had given her did not fully suit her. She was still sleeping outdoors at night. Jon was always up late, in his studio, working on music. He’d come into the house for some reason and she’d chirp at him as he’d walk past her curled up in a chair on the deck. She was very talkative, chirping and meowing and trilling to us when we’d pet her and talk to her. A few hours later he’d come back into the house and there she’d be, inside.
“She’s a sneaky one,” he said one morning, as he was laughing about the fact that she would sneak in past him as he was headed out back to the garage. “Aren’t you, Sneaky Le Boo?” as he ruffled her fur.
It stuck. “Sneaky” is a funny name for, well, anyone, cat or otherwise. But Sneaky Le Boo it was, or Sneaky for short.
A month or so passed and it started to get colder, she had come to us in early fall. I did not want her sleeping out in the cold and Jon and I began talking in earnest about letting her fully take up residence in our house. We figured as healers maybe we should actively work on healing our cat allergies. I remembered at the time that I had read in Barbara Marciniak’s book, “Bringers of the Dawn” that many cat allergies were a manifestation of an inability to receive unconditional love.
Yuck!
We did not want that issue.
So we let her in, all the way in, in our house, in our bedroom, in our bed, on our laps, into our hearts. It took about a month for the reactions to stop completely. She came to bed with me every night and I often fell asleep with my face in her fur. We both exposed ourselves as much as we could to her and received all of the love she had to give us and we all three found ourselves healed. She rapidly gained back her ability to trust and we gained a freedom we thought gone from us in this life, the freedom to interact with the feline species.
She got more and more comfortable with us the more freely we were able to connect with her. She stopped acting like she was a boarder who happened to be living in our home and became deeply embedded in our family. She loved food, in part due to the fact that she almost starved to death, and would sneak anything and everything she could get her little paws on. One night Jon had set himself a plate of shrimp down on the coffee table and then went back to the kitchen for something else. He came back to see Sneaky’s head down licking all of his shrimp. And the water from our glasses tasted way better than the water in her dish, especially drunk off her paw after dunking it in our glasses. Eventually, we just put a mug filled with water on the coffee table for her and let her know that it was for her use.
I dropped a piece of popcorn on the floor one night. She ate it and looked at me for more. From then on any time she heard me making popcorn, she’d come running.
Every night at 7 pm on the dot she would walk over to the cabinet where her treats were and meow until I gave her something.
Her communication skills continued to grow as she added to her repertoire. She’d meow at me in the morning for her breakfast and if I did not heed her meows she’d then go into the bathroom and thump her paw on the cupboard door which made it open and then she’d slam it shut, again.
“Sneaky, give me 10 more minutes,” I’d call from the bedroom.
Exactly 10 minutes later — Thump. Bam!
And again, a few more times until I’d acquiesce and get up and groggily feed her.
Her purr was as all kitty purrs are, resonant and healing, and she’d knead her paws in a trance so strongly into our legs, we’d have to put a blanket in our laps for protection. She was a needy love monster and we were lucky enough to be the humans she found. She completely debunked the myth that cats are independent beings who are indifferent to humans. Cats, we have come to discover, are immediate reflectors. The more you open yourselves up to them, the more they will share themselves with you.
She also loved to involve herself in our work, sometimes coming into my space with me when I had clients. A particularly fond memory I have is of Sneaky launching herself from a chair to the belly of a client of ours who was on our table at the time receiving reiki. Sneaky settled herself right in on our client’s third charka and started purring away.
In early 2007 I got a nudge that we needed to move south.
“Really?” I said to my people.
“Really?” Jon said to me.
“Yes” to us both.
So he and I set off down the coast exploring California from San Luis Obispo County on down to San Diego. I had a fantasy about San Luis Obispo County based on location and cost of housing, but it just did not seem to be the right fit for us after being there for a few days and we continued south.
A Chicago client had suggested that we check out Ojai. Her son was in boarding school there at the time.
“I think you’ll like it. It’s very spiritual,” she said to me.
We headed east away from the beaches of Ventura and into the Ojai Valley. Now at the time, my idea of Southern California was living near the ocean, preferably at or near the beach and Ojai just seemed too far away from that experience. We pulled into town around 4:30 pm, walked the main drag, had some coffee in a local shop there, and chatted with a very cranky screenwriter.
We hightailed it out of there feeling like it was a definite No.
We spent a few days in LA which were a combination of fun and friends and food and feeling totally overwhelmed by the urban environment after living 2 and a half years in the redwoods and continued south to Encinitas.
We slept one night in Encinitas, right near the ocean. Actually, I believe the town we slept in was Del Mar, but we knew Del Mar was a little too rich for our blood and that Encinitas or Leucadia was right for us. I awoke feeling clear and refreshed and just great for the first time on this trip south and we decided that Encinitas was where we’d relocate.
We drove home, gave notice, and started packing. We also took Sneaky for a few car rides to practice for the 11-plus hour drive south. She hated the car and only would settle between the feet of whoever was sitting in the passenger seat. I know, I know, this is completely the wrong way to travel with a cat, and I have never done it since. But Sneaky was insistent that it was this or listen to her yowl and cry all the way south.
Our move to Encinitas in a lot of ways emulated our move to Northern California. We had gone back down and scoped out the rental scene. Finding nothing that worked in the few days we had, we opted to rent a furnished home for the first 4 months we were there which would give us the time to find what we needed.
Sneaky handled the ride down like a champ, snuggled on the floor between our feet on the first day’s driving down, only chirping and meowing every once in a while. And then completely crashed out in the backseat in her bed on the second day. She loved the beach air and energy as did we, and she settled into our new house there without a hitch, heading outside soon after we moved in, uninterested in leaving the property. She was getting older and more tired.
Two and a half months flew by and we began to look in earnest for housing. And we came up dry. Again and again. Finally, just a day or two prior to needing to leave the house we were in, as the full-time tenants were returning, we stumbled upon something that we thought was right. We left and moved into a hotel for a couple of nights, as the rental we had found was not quite ready. I awoke the first morning in that hotel, and every cell in my body was screaming at me not to move into that house.
“Shit,” I said to Jon. “We can not move into that house.”
“Wait, What!?!”
“I am telling you, my whole body is racked with fear about it.”
“Then we can not move there if that is the way you are feeling,” he said.
I immediately called the woman who owned the house and let her know we’d changed our minds. I felt terrible, as I really liked her personally, but I knew that we would suffer if we chose to live there.
And now we were homeless. Jon, Sneaky Le Boo, and I had only a 2-night reservation in a hotel and then were staring into an abyss. Looking back I wish I could have handled that differently (although I am not sure how, maybe lightened up more and yelled less?)
We decided not to continue staying in the hotel we were in and I found a pet-friendly Econo Lodge in Encinitas right in one of the areas that felt most desirable to us. We moved ourselves and Sneaky over there and on our way drove past a house with a rental sign right out in front. It was 2 and a half blocks from Moonlight Beach with clear ocean views from the deck and much of the house and just a couple of blocks from the downtown drag in town. It was not listed on Craigslist or anywhere else for that matter and it is unlikely we would have seen it had we not been driving to the Econo Lodge. We called the number and the owner let us know he’d be showing it in one week and that the house would not be ready for occupancy for another two weeks after that as there were some repairs needed.
Three weeks in the Econo Lodge with Sneaky Le Boo, and that was dependent on us getting that house. The rental market there was tight, clearly.
We began to refer to that period of time as our Econo Lodge Vision Quest as a way to spiritually bypass how much we were actually freaking out. Sneaky took it all on and after a week she began crying and crying all night long. The stress of being in a hotel room was too much for her, and we found a kennel in which to board her. We visited her daily, but she was not happy about it, not happy at all. I think she thought she was being abandoned again and as much as we talked with her about it, her earlier trauma was too severe.
It was at this pet hotel however that we discovered Sneaky’s breed. Jon picked up a book on cats and suddenly called out, “Sneaky’s a Maine Coon”. She had all of the personality traits described as well as the size (she was a bigger girl). We assumed she was at least half Maine Coon.
We finally were able to see the house and, as we thought, it was the best of anything we had seen at that point. We applied and the landlord let us know we were second in line based on his “first come first serve” policy. The people in front of us, however, fell through and he called us to let us know the house was ours.
We spent two more weeks in limbo, trying to have fun, while not really being able to completely relax and just be. Sneaky was separate from us, who knew if we were actually going to be able to move into that house, ugh, our Econo Lodge Vision Quest sucked.
Yet, somehow, we did it. We signed the lease. We moved our stuff out of storage. It had been there since we’d left Guerneville 5 months earlier, and we raced over to get Sneaky. As soon as I picked her up and put her in the carrier she was herself again.
Sneaky loved that beach house. Every morning she’d walk past me, give me a chirp, wander out onto the deck, and curl up in her kitty bed, listening to the sound of the waves and breathing in the ocean air.
She spent most of the last six months of her life in this world as Sneaky Le Boo right there, on that deck.
In early March of 2008, she went missing. She had been spending some time in the grass in our front garden, and I went out to check on her and she was gone. It was the first time she’d left the property. We were no longer living on a quiet country lane. This was more suburban-like and I was worried about her. I started crying and then got even more worried that I was reacting so strongly. I called for her and called for her and nothing.
Two hours later I heard her meow. She was in the yard next door and could not figure out how to get back home to our yard. I ran over there and grabbed her, snuggling her to me.
She was like, “What’s the fuss, Mom?”
A few weeks later she stopped eating. I tried to fool myself into thinking that maybe she just had a bug or something. Her arthritis was also pretty bad at this point in her hips and I noticed that she had more trouble jumping up and jumping down.
Jon and I decided that we’d take her to the vet the next day. That night, I brought her to bed with me like I always had and I remember thinking to myself that it might be the last night I’d get to sleep with her. As usual, I heard her jump off the bed at some point in the middle of the night.
She was wobbly that morning as I made the vet appointment. She’d be fine and then start to fall over a bit. I was rushing Jon to get dressed and she meowed at him in tandem with me.
The news at the vet’s office was not good. She was in kidney failure and it would take a lot of effort to even see if they could regulate her kidney function which was minimal at that point. They were very compassionate and very clear that Sneaky was unlikely to recover.
Jon and I sat with her in the exam room, crying, talking with her about what she wanted. I got up to get some water in the waiting area and asked for a clear sign on what to do next.
The receptionist was on the phone and I heard her say, “Mishka’s ashes are ready to be picked up.”
It was clear and concise and exactly what I needed to stop the screaming in my head as my mind tried to decide something that was really not my decision to make at all. It was Sneaky’s. She was ready and she was letting me know.
I returned to the room and shared with Jon and we decided to euthanize there. She very easily left her body. I saw a burst of yellow light leave her body, move up the wall, zoom around the room for a moment, and then poof, it was gone, as was she. We left her body there to be cremated and got on the elevator empty carrier in hand, sobbing, both of us, in the midst of sudden and shocking grief.
Grief. It is always painful, whether it comes slowly or quickly, and this one felt quick. We’d only had two and a half years with her and we’d loved her so much.
The shock returned when we opened the door to our house. The space left by her absence felt massive. She was a giant in our lives and she was physically gone, no longer there to greet us at the door as she always had with her chirps and trills and meows and love.
Four days later we would meet Izzy and The Smurf.