Kitty

About two and a half years ago, I got a cat. Her name is Tenny, she was from a rescue organization. She loves exploring and finding that small spot to hide. Normal cat stuff. Because she lived the first 8 months of her life in a shelter, I think she learned that making noise doesn't do anything. No human is going to come running if you complain, so when she first came to my house, she was silent. She purred, eventually, once she trusted us, but nothing else.

It took her a few weeks to warm up to us, and realize that we were going to keep her. Eventually she came out of the crawl space, and she started wanting attention. Still silently, and because of a birth defect, she couldn't jump on the couch, so we had to try to catch her to give her the attention she wanted.

Then, one day the husband left a dresser drawer open, no big deal, right? Well, Tenny decided to climb into that soft bed of clothes. Due to a shift in weight, the drawer then closed. She must have been stuck in there for hours, and we had no idea. Eventually, we realized that we hadn't seen her in a while (luckily it was a weekend, so we were home) and started searching the house. We found her and figured out that we couldn't leave things open.

When we went on holidays the next summer, we left her with my Aunt who has a very vocal cat. And, low and behold, when we came back, our dear silent Tenny was replaced with one that yowls exactly like my Aunt's cat. How I miss my silent Tenny.

The good news is that after a couple of years, she has gotten much stronger and can now jump onto our laps while we are sitting, but can not quite make the distance to the table or counter height. This is perfect as I would hate to have to try to train her to not go on the table or counter. We just have to have the chairs pushed in all the time, or she does go on the table and eats my plants. Tenny also runs around the house as quickly as she can. Now, I live in a three level split, with about 440 sq feet on each level, so her space is quite limited, and the stairs are relatively short. I can not wait to get a bigger house to give her more room to run around it. I just hope that it does not give her the extra strength needed to jump to counter level.