A Ditty for Two Cats

A DITTY
You are the blues

of my eyes.

You are the fishes

that caught the flies.

You are the float I climbed

aboard, as

the queen mother Mabel roared.

I am so glad to catch even a tad of your blue.
Blue means first place, first place in the shoe!

Above: Mabel

At Left: Ady

How Mabel & Ady Found Me

The runt of her mother Daisy's litter, Mabel had been bottle-fed as a kitten, by a young 20-something year-old woman, a friend's friend, who not much later one day suddenly collapsed and died.  Another friend of theirs took Mabel, then called May, because May had meanwhile become pregnant. In the care of third friend, May gave birth to three gray and three tabby kittens. The day I first met May, she looked up at me with big eyes from inside the cardboard box where she lay nursing her kittens.  She was rather tiny and very thin, and she stole my heart right then and there.  I eventually renamed her Mabel because I often called her May-belle when I made up little ditties and chanted them to her.

Ady was found under the hood of a truck in a neighboring village by the friend of a friend last September. I happened to visit my friend, and Ady, at the time a nameless (to our knowledge anyway) tuxedo kitten with the squiggliest eyebrows and paws with white mittens, was hopping about on my friend's kitchen table, trespassing so to say, as even my friend's grown male cat cannot under any circumstances walk on said table.  I took Ady with me for the weekend, and of course, she is still here.

Both my own mother and father, r.i.p., had aunts who died as youngsters during the late 1800s and very early 1900s, probably from illnesses such as influenza.  Those young girls, Mabel and Adele, are buried near their respective parents in the local cemeteries I sometimes visit.  Though neither my parents nor I ever knew those girls, they are often thought of around here.