My husband
was very proud of his Christmas gift to me but I'm afraid I was not very happy about having a kitten in the house, pedigreed blue Burmese or not. I had a new baby and a toddler so this cute
ball of grey fluff seemed like too much hard work. It occurred to me that she was going to be
more trouble than the baby. She had to
be fed 4 times a day at first and came complete with suggested menu for those
meals. We named her Misty but that was
gradually changed to Bee because our toddler, Kara, couldn’t pronounce “Misty”
properly.
She was as
cute as a button and wonderful fun but there were times we could have
cheerfully strangled her. However, she
turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to our family because if not
for her we might all be dead! The
children were three and four when one winter night she woke me making a hell of
a racket at our closed bedroom door. She
was scratching at the door, yowling and leaping up at the door handle. I got up to chastise her and found to my
horror that the kitchen was on fire!
I "alerted" my husband, Paul (Wake up!! The house is on fire!!!!) and let the cat out the front door. Then we evacuated the
children and their grandmother, who was visiting for the weekend. After I ran up to the back neighbours, through the bush, they kindly opened their home to us. Bee sat on the top step until everyone was
out safely, only then taking to the bush.
We lived in the country and had very poor water pressure so it wasn’t
long before our dear old weatherboard home had burned to the ground despite the
best efforts of our rural fire brigade.
We managed to save only a few items of clothing and bedding.
Without
Bee to sound the alarm, we may have succumbed to smoke inhalation, even if we had been
woken by the sound of the fire, smoke alarms being a thing of the future. Certainly, the children would have had less
chance, as their bedroom was closest to the seat of the fire. We still shudder to think of what might have
been had it not been for that brave puss.
In her
final days at the age of twelve (that’s 84 in cat years!), she was frail and
thin and spent her days sleeping in the sun, no doubt dreaming of the sleek,
action cat she used to be. She lived and
died a heroine.
Thanks a
million Bee, we still miss you.
© SMG 2008 - originally published (with much poetic licence) by that's life! Issue #38
