Sugar is our eight year old grey cat. We adopted her from Paws as a kitten, almost choosing a livelier black one until my middle daughter (of course)refused to agree with the rest of us, claiming the one she held would sit in her lap and why would you get a cat that was too wild to cuddle? I tried to tell her that all kittens are playful, but she wouldn’t budge, and honestly when she digs in it’s pointless to argue. So home we went with the grey “tabby” as she was listed, but I’m convinced she has some Siamese in her because her ears were huge in proportion to her face when she was little, and she has that particular yowl of Siamese cats. My son came up with her name. She has white feet and he said it looked like she had walked through powdered sugar, so Sugar she became.
There are cat people and non cat people. My husband was a non cat person. I, of course, was a cat person. I had had several cats growing up and wanted to give my children the same comfort I had taken from the purring body of a cat laying on my stomach when I was lonely or sad, or even just cold. No cashmere blanket feels as good as a cat’s warm, soft body, vibrating with soothing noises. I didn’t exactly convince him. I just went ahead and took the kids to Paws, the same way I got our first dog, without permission, but certain I was doing the right thing. And sure enough, that cat goes to him first on our bed if we’re both in it. He tried to resist her at first, but she would crawl up into his chest, tuck her head under his chin and knead her paws, making him wince when her claws punctured his skin. “Too rough Shugie,” he would say, petting her awkwardly, but his expression was smug as he glanced over at me.
Sugar is democratic in spreading her love. She alternates fairly evenly between the kids’ beds when she sleeps. But whoever is having a particularly bad day, that is whose arms you will find her in. She is very emotionally intelligent, as most cats are, and can sense sadness, need or longing within moments. She arrives almost by magic into the room of whoever is suffering and gives the comfort of her presence. Whenever one of the kids is quietly crying, not screaming in a tantrum (Sugar doesn’t do tantrums), she is usually damp with tears from being held so tightly. Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s cheap therapy if you ask me. She eats kibble which I know is junk food, but she won’t eat any brand of canned food, except the neighbor’s. She goes in their cat door and eats their cat’s Fancy Feast and then saunters out. I’ve tried to buy Fancy Feast, all flavors, but she only likes eating it at their house. I guess it’s like sandwiches taste better when someone else makes them. She’s an outside cat so we don’t have a litter box. That’s the extent of her maintenance. She goes to the vet infrequently now because the last time the vet gave her a shot she hissed at him and scratched him pretty badly. “Damn, she’s like a feral cat,” he said, “all muscle.” He told me next time I had to give her a tranquilizer before bringing her in so I just haven’t taken her back. Rabies shots last three years now anyway, and she’s healthy.
She does bring in lots of trophies though. We’ve had mice and birds mostly, some dead, some alive. My son is the most squeamish about the carcasses he finds in the basement and gets mad at Sugar, like that’s going to change her biological nature. In the last week I’ve rescued a tiny field mouse and a sparrow from her clutches, and set them free in the yard. It really annoys my son when she plays with her prey. He thinks she’s torturing them. We got in an argument about instinct versus premeditated torture recently. I told him to ask his Zoology teacher because I got tired of the debate. Sugar isn’t just huntress and comfort though, she also has a sense of humor and loves nothing more than hiding from Charlie and pouncing on her as she walks by. They chase each other around the house at least a few times a day. And she goes on walks with the dogs and me around the neighborhood. Her collar has a bell (amazing she catches so many mice and birds – she must have perfected a silent glide) so I can tell how close she is to us, but if I turn around she stops and pretends like she’s not with us, as if she was just going the same way coincidentally. Unless I get too far ahead and there’s construction trucks or landscapers blowing or a barking dog that she is uneasy about passsing, then she yowls for us to wait.
Sugar does sharpen her claws on the furniture, which drives my husband crazy. He tried to get me to declaw her, but I told him she needed them for self-defense. We have raccoons in the neighborhood. She also sheds, a lot, and her favorite place to sleep during the day is on the velvet chairs in the living room which cost a fortune to cover. She has excellent taste. She rarely gets hair balls, but when she does she usually pukes them out on my middle daughter’s bed when she’s out of town for a horse show. The punishment is personal, I told her.
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