Anyone remember "the Shuttered Room"? This terrifying 1960s horror movie in which the young bride finally figures out what is going on in the locked, shuttered room upstairs? I saw it, unfortunately, when I was just a girl and it scared me to death. What I remember was that in the shuttered room (spoiler alert) there's a crazy old chained up lady dressed in rags with long matted hair!
Now I have a similar situation in my own life: Zane Gray.
To thank me for taking her in and feeding her and giving her warmth and lots of petting and a nice bath and delicious cream and chicken livers and a new cat door to the basement and veterinary care and a new cat toy, she PEED on Elias's bed. Three times! Then she peed in my closet for good measure.
So now she's locked up again in the basement. She's warm and has food a litter box down there. I can't let her into normal society because I think that part of her brain got digested during her starvation-based sojourn in the woods. What this means is that I now have a crazy lady in the basement, with disheveled fur and no tail, who I have to feed and tend to, yet who has no usefulness to me in terms of normal cat things like being pretty and being petted. And the thing I keep thinking is, "Is she really only seven? That means she could live another 13 years!"
I'm especially miffed because I was all primed up to get one or two nice NORMAL cats who could come up into the house and live productive decent lives catching mice, being petted, being lap cats, and entertaining the children. But the presence of Miss Crazy makes this all impossible.
It's true that when I go down and visit her, I'll give her a little petting time, and she purrs, and she's, well, SORT OF cute, if you look at her right, and I do feel bad for her. She only weighs four pounds and is a furry skeleton and this is a pathetic sight. When she first got home, before the peeing incidents, she sat on my lap for a least a half hour straight, purring loudly and even, bizarrely SMILING. I was touched by that, but when I found all the peed-on bedding I wanted to throw her back out into the snow.
Anyone want a fun and heart-warming charity project?