Snowball

My dad called. He asked my mom if she wanted any more cats. My mom said no, that we already had plenty, but when she heard they would be put to sleep if we didn’t take them, she agreed. When my dad came home, he didn’t have any cats. Instead, he got out some chicken wire and some wood and built a cage. He explained that the two cats we were getting were wild cats and would run away if we didn’t keep them in a cage. We already had a lot of cats, but these two were going to be special.

The woman who worked at the local humane society hated putting animals to sleep, so whenever she had a cat that was about to be euthanized she would call on my dad to see if we would take another cat. We need a lot of cats to help with the mice and many didn’t make it because they would be eaten in the middle of the night by the coyotes that lived up on the hill. The next day when I heard my father pull up the driveway, I ran outside. When he got out, he had a gunnysack that was squirming all over. Our two new cats were screeching with anger from within. Immediately he took them to their cage and released them. We went in and had dinner and agreed that the calico cat would be Lisa’s and the white longhaired cat would be mine. I named her Snowball.

Every day I would climb in that small chicken wire cage and force Snowball to sit in my lap and be petted. She hated it with a passion. She would scratch and claw and do everything in her power to escape. After each episode in the cage, I came inside with scratches from head to toe and my mother would put band-aids on the most severe. My unconditional love for my new cat was unrelenting. Despite the pain that Snowball inflicted upon me, I crawled in time and time again. Eventually, it paid off. Snowball became very tame. She became a loved cat by all in the family.
One day I noticed that Snowball had a cold. We had too many cats to count and we didn’t take our animals to the vet. It was just too expensive for farm cats that could be alive one day and dinner for a coyote the next. But Snowball was special. I begged and pleaded with my father to, just this once, get medicine for Snowball from the vet. I offered to pay for the medicine. I didn’t have any money, but I promised the money I would get from the Easter Bunny that spring. I truly think my dad thought about doing it, but there really wasn’t any extra money for things like that. Every day I would ask my dad if he had gotten the medicine, and he would say “No. Maybe tomorrow.” It was looking like Snowball was getting better, but one day, Snowball was nowhere to be found. I called and called for her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I never saw her again. I knew she had died from that cold. I was so angry with my dad for not saving my beloved cat. I held that anger inside me for many many years. One day when I was in junior high school Snowball came up in a dinner conversation. It was then that I found out that Snowball hadn’t died of a cold. My dad had found her dead on the road and had buried her. He thought it would be best if the cat had just disappeared. He thought that the truth would have been too hard. If he only had known that I blamed him all those years for not saving her life.