She Had Me at Meow

On the Friday before Labor Day, 2016, I drove to the Fairfax County Animal Shelter on Ox Road. I had gotten home from Paris two days before. That first night home I crashed into a deep sleep after my nine hour flight. But my second night, I went sleepless.

Our house on Rosemary Lane felt hollow and empty around me. My husband John had died the previous November. During my six weeks abroad, I had been able to put my grief, remorse, and guilt on hold. Yet returning to the house I had shared with John for 37 years brought all those emotions back refreshed. The house’s stillness seeped into me. No one was home except me.

So jet-lagged and lonely, I headed to the animal shelter.

John had forbidden any pets, a prohibition I ignored several decades earlier when I brought home an abandoned cat from Cox Farm. My son and some friends and I had gone to Cox Farm to buy pumpkins for Halloween and take a hay ride when I met a sweet orange tom. The lady who ran the farm explained that people were always leaving cats they didn’t want at the farm as if these poor creatures could fend for themselves. John was furious at me for bringing a cat home, but I faced his ire and kept Marmalade, who delighted me so.

Marmalade became my constant companion. He helped me write. These were early days for computers. I recall sitting upstairs writing on our big desktop computer with Marmalade on the chair beside me, his round furry face reflected in the screen. He would eat anything, including cake frosting, and grew to be almost 20 pounds before he contracted feline leukemia.

That day in 2016 I went through the shelter’s website, perused the cat photos, and chose an orange tom named Mickey. Because of Marmalade I was certain, Mickey and I would be a good match, but when I met him, I began to have doubts. Once they let him out of his cubicle, he ran and ran and would not let me touch him. “He’s a little hyper,” the shelter lady said. I told her I might need a calmer cat.

“This one just came in today.” With that she opened a cubicle and the tabby inside with gorgeous markings, rolled over on her back, and let me pet her snowy white tummy. Her purring was so loud it echoed inside me. I fell in love with this beautiful creature, who could have been a super model cat except for her short stubby legs.

Not until I stood in line with her file did I read her wrap sheet. As a kitten, she had been adopted from the shelter and returned less than a year later. Her former owner said she did not like babies and she was “too curious.” Also they had named her “Danica Patrick,” who I had to google since I didn’t recognize the name. Discovering that these former owners were NASCAR fans explained everything to me. They had not understood this sensitive creature.

I renamed her Zelda, for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, and began to spoil her. She wouldn’t eat so I cooked her hamburger in butter. She liked yogurt smoothie’s but only Dannon strawberry. My house became overrun with cat toys, cat beds, and scratching platforms.

That was three years ago now. In that time I learned that Zelda is a difficult high maintenance cat. As I write this, I sit in a beautiful mid-century modern chair, one of four I have covered in tinfoil in an effort to break her of clawing the chairs’ upholstery. She spent last week in and out of the vet’s having every test available, including an ultrasound and ringing up an incredible bill so we could figure out why she stopped eating. Turns out nothing was wrong with her. She has since returned to her normal picky self. No, Zelda is not my easy-going Marmalade, but I cannot imagine life without her.