Cats

 When Celia and I moved to Douglas County in October of 2006 we brought along 16 cats from our place we sold on Ash Street in Cottage Grove.  Now you’re probably asking yourself how did we acquire all those cats?   It was a combination of cats Celia had at her house on 1st Street in Cottage Gove and a few I inherited while living in Eugene from 1991 to 2000.   Some were left to me by my daughter when she left home and others that wandered in after being abandoned from an apartment complex a few blocks away.   We don’t remember the exact number when we got married in 2000 and bought a house together on Ash Street in Cottage Grove.    The people that we bought the house from had been feeding stray cats that lived in the alley behind the house.   They asked us to continue feeding them.  There may have been three or four at that time.    Over the six years we lived in the Ash Street house more cats showed up.   They must have sensed this was a good place to hang out.  There were white cats, orange cats, black cats, multi colored cats, skinny cats and few fat cats.   Two more cats showed up that were left behind by a couple that were renting a house down the street from us.  There was one cat that started showing at the back door whining for something to eat at night.  He was a black cat Celia called Marvin.  He would eat then run off.  Eventually he would let Celia pet him.   During the winters many of these cats lived under the tool shed we had in the back yard.   In addition to all the cats there was my dog Jack, who was raised with cats when I lived in Eugene.   

In 2006 we sold the Ash Street house to a woman who was allergic to cats and a condition of the sale was all the cats had go.    It took a week to trap the wild cats and bring them to our new place in Douglas County.   There is a shop by the house where we put all the cats to have them adjust to the move.  The first night they figured out how to open a back entrance into a dog pen behind the shop.   The next day we had cats scattered all over the mountain side.   For the next week we could see cats running through the woods, the neighbor’s pasture down near the highway and in the meadow on our lower 10 acres.  Over the next few weeks most of the cats came back, except Marvin who we never saw again.    My old dog Jack never made the move either, as we had to send over the Rainbow Bridge due to health issues that come with old age.   With winter coming on I built a two story cat house in the back of the shop with a heater where cats could take shelter from the cold weather.    There never was a rat problem in the shop.  

Some of our domesticated cats stayed in the house during the winter nights.  In addition to the cats we moved from Cottage Grove the previous owner of our new property left us her cat since she was moving near the highway in Elkton knowing her cat would not survive there.   Over the years cats started disappearing, we suspect from critters, such as a Bob cat that has been spotted in the vicinity.   We call him the Boogie kitty and many of our cats have become cautious of getting too far from the house.   Other cats died from diseases or were taken to the Vet for the trip over the Rainbow Bridge.  Some of these were replaced by other cats that wandered onto the place, either from being dumped down the road or one we call Joe that we believe had been abused by a neighbor up the hill.   Joe is still with us.

After 14 years of living here we are down to four cats and the oldest being Toby pushing 20 years.  He was picked out of a box of kittens in front of the Cottage Grove Bi-Mart by Celia in 2000 or 2001.   There is sadness thinking back on all these cats that were part of our family.    The good side of the story is most of these cats had a good life because we took them into our care knowing many of them would never had made it without us.