It has been seven years since Boo passed over to the Rainbow Bridge, it makes Valentines Day bittersweet for me.
Boo was the first cat I got as an adult, and on my own. I planned his adoption very well, waiting to get a cat until I had two weeks off work to bond with my new cat. I went to the St. Croix Valley Animal Shelter in Dec. 1987 and saw a black kitten, about 4 months old, and he was climbing the wire in his cage to come home with me. So he did.
Boo was a wild kitten, I had scratch marks up and down my arms from playing with him. He mellowed out after he was neutered, but still could rip me when he was playing! Here's some pictures of Boo shortly after I adopted him:
Boo moved a lot with me, I changed addresses 6 times while I had him, he always traveled well. I bought a house and moved out into the country, where I got other cats, (plus the cat the people who had moved out left!), but Boo never liked any other cats. Kittens, however, were a different story. Boo loved kittens and took them under his wing. When I got Bo in 1989, Boo quickly took to him and those two were inseperable.
Boo and Bo:
When I lived in the country, he had been allowed outdoors. Once, he was gone 5 days, and came home with a broken pelvis. I can't figure out how he dragged himself up the stairs to my deck, where the cat door was. He could barely walk and still he managed to drag himself home and up the stairs. I still don't know what happened, but he healed up from that.
About a year later, he started pulling out clumps of hair from over his hips. I had him tested for everything at the vet's, but we couldn't figure out why his hair was going missing. We finally chalked it up to stress, he had lost a kitten friend shortly before that. His hair never grew back, I got used to it but people who hadn't seen him before freaked and asked me what had happened to my cat. I do have pictures of that, but not scanned in. I will post a picture of an adult Boo, in his prime:
I moved again, back into town. He had to become an indoor cat, and he took it in stride. One night I came home, and something was wrong with Boo. He was laying in one spot, and didn't come to greet me when I got home like he usually did. I took him to the vet, and he was in bad shape. Lymphatic sarcoma.
He died early in the morning on Feb. 14, 1996. He was still at the vet's, and he never got to come home to say goodbye to Bo. I took the rest of the week off work to grieve. I couldn't stand to see him dead, I wanted to remember him alive, so my SO Jeff went and picked his body up at the vet's and buried him. It was February, and the ground was frozen. Jeff took a little charcoal grill out and thawed the ground, it took hours. Jeff also built a wooden box, and I picked out a few trinkets and his collar to put in the box with him.
The following spring, I planted 3 white bleeding hearts over his gravesite.
Here's to you, Boo, I still miss you. He was a very special boy and was with me through some of the toughest times in my life. Despite his tough guy exterior, he was a sweet loving cat inside.
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