Upstairs Maude

My cat Maude lives upstairs. That is, she never ventures downstairs where most of the action is: cooking and eating, working on my laptop, reading, listening to music, hanging with the dogs. The dogs may be why Maude remains upstairs, but there are other factors at play, I think.

I “rescued” Maude from my neighbor Matthew’s house, where she was contending with a puppy and a kitten by hiding under any furniture inaccessible to the puppy and kitten. Matthew had taken Maude in due to her previous owner’s allergies—no information beyond that as to age, previous tenure, etc. Seeing as how she has to claw the spread to climb up the beds where she spends most of her days, I suspect she’s an old gal. But once there, she’s an affectionate bedtime partner, snuggling up to convey warmth both ways.

Cats in El Valle are an endangered species due to coyotes and owls (and unfriendly dogs) so it’s good Maude lives upstairs. As a guilty enabler, I’ve had plenty of them over the years—both here and in Placitas, another dangerous rural environment—who had to navigate these dangers. It all began with Alley Cat, a little gray girl who facilitated my relationship with Mark, my partner of 34 years, way back in 1976. At the time I was working as the fire lookout on Mount Taylor and I took Alley with me to the tower (I also took my dogs Chani and Judge). She played on the catwalk surrounding my tiny little room and I tucked her in my jacket on evening walks. But one week when I left her home with my roommates, I came home to find she’d been poisoned, probably with antifreeze, and the vet couldn’t save her. Mark was with me at the vet’s and stayed with me while I grieved.

Mark had two cats himself, Belle and Pie, so when we moved in together in Placitas, we had a full household of cats and dogs. But it soon expanded. A young yellow tabby showed up one day and decided to stay. During one of her climbing forays she knocked over a bottle of salad dressing that drenched her, thus becoming her name. Next, a beautiful gray guy decided he preferred living with us rather than our neighbor, who graciously relinquished him. We named him Merle. While living in the village we started building a house out near Tunnel Springs. That’s where Cisco turned up one day, a short-haired gray tabby who we of course brought home.

No, we didn’t have five cats at one time. Belle and Pie were fairly old cats and we lost them to age as we accumulated Salad Dressing, Merle, and Cisco. And we didn’t get to have Cisco very long. He had a very weird habit of sleeping over the back of a chair, standing on his hind lets with his head and front paws hanging down. It turned out he had a tear in one of his heart valves and this position allowed him to breathe better. But the tear got worse and he struggled more and more to breathe, which resulted in one of those horrible situations most of us with animals have had to confront: whether to have the vet put him down. When the vet told us he couldn’t fix the tear, we had to say goodbye.

Fern showed up next. A long-haired gray tabby, she was one of my all-time favorites—sweet, affectionate, yet fearless and independent. When we moved out of the Placitas village to the new house, she’d go for walks with us into the forest, warily darting from tree to tree in case those coyotes or owls were watching. Neither Fern nor Merle did well with the move from the village to new house and decided numerous times to return to their home of origin. This is a fairly common occurrence with cats, but Merle took it to the nth degree: I think we drove back to retrieve him at least 10 or 15 times. He finally decided to stay.

While we loved living next to the forest, it’s probably why we eventually lost Merle, Fern, and Salad Dressing, who all disappeared without a trace. So by the time we gave it all up and moved from Placitas to El Valle—my book Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, documents in excruciating detail why we left—we had no cats. Alas, that was not to last. My friend Susan Larson, a veterinarian, gave us a going away present of two tortoise shell sisters whom we named Thelma and Louise. Thelma disappeared within months of our relocation, but Louise lived to a ripe old age of 15 because she, like Maude, liked living inside (though Louise did venture downstairs).

The tale of many cats continued during our almost 30 year residency in El Valle. Honus, named by younger son Max who was besotted with baseball cards (named for Honus Wagner, slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates) showed up one day and became one of our favorites. He was also well liked by our neighbor Tomás, whom he would visit to hunt gophers, or “rattas,” as Tomás called them. We had Honus for a good number of years and were heartbroken when he, too, disappeared.

We also took in Blanche, a black feral cat that Mark’s sister-in-law dumped on us while visiting. She found her lurking around our friend’s house where she was staying for the visit and figured Blanche could be domesticated. She couldn’t. While she came in the house to eat and sleep, she basically lived outdoors and disdained human contact. She soon disappeared.

Then we took in Ernie, a black and white kitten who was sweet and playful, which extended to putting his head in our dog Django’s mouth as they rolled around the living room floor. But one day Ernie took sick and we took him to the emergency vet in Taos, who announced that he had cancer and was dying. The vet put him down and in shock we brought him home to bury. Max was completely caught off guard and distraught that we came home with a dead cat. It was probably one of the first times he’d been around a dead creature; he cried and cried.

After the kids left home we acquired an orange tabby named Mavis from a young friend who went off to work for the Forest Service. Mavis exemplified what is lovely about orange tabbies: affectionate, smart, independent, and quirky.

After Mavis disappeared, I swore off cats. I was by myself by then (Mark died in 2010) and didn’t need any more heartbreak. Suffice it to say, I ended up taking in several more cats for short term stays that I won’t go into detail about as it’s all too depressing. Maude is here, though, safe and sound upstairs. Even though she doesn’t come downstairs, the mice in the house seem to have sensed a cat is in the hood and have disappeared. And bird lovers can’t chastise me for having an indoor/outdoor cat. But reading back through this post I’m appalled: in my almost 50 years of rural residency I’ve had eighteen cats (OK, I’m admitting to the three I took in after swearing them off)! My friend Jan, who lives in town, has had two over the course of almost 40 years (long lived cats). My only defense is that I never actively solicited any of them. They came to me (and to Mark). While it means I have a soft heart, it also means that in the larger scheme of things the human population is not dealing very well with the cat population and should probably heed the bird lovers’ advice and stop domesticating them. In the meantime, I hope the universe does not send me any more cats.