Before any "farm" stories - and there are just a few- I feel I must write a "cat" blog as Precious our 19 year old Rag doll, sort of a longer-haired Siamese, yowls her way into the master bedroom where earlier she slept curled under my arm and under covers. Precious sits on the front porch by Snoopy, the long haired, gray cat.

Sometimes I think I started running a nursing home for elderly cats sometime around the year 2000 as that year the vet removed her cataract covered eye (she was born with it and never could see out of it) . During the summer of 2000 the whites of that eye began to turn red and she cried as though in pain rubbing her eye against whatever presented itself for relief. The vet thought she might have a tumor growing behind the eye but thought removing it would help, especially since she couldn't see out of it and we would not run the expense of taking her to a cat eye doctor (yes, such do exist but the nearest one practices in Memphis I'm told). He said the other eye would be fine. Anyway the surgery was performed, no tumor found, and the other good eye never undiluted (apparently, she'd been given too much of the medication used to dilate the pupil!). When she went into surgery her vision was fine - when she came home she'd lost one eye and all vision. She gradually adjusted to the lose becoming more verbal with each passing day. Twice she disappeared for three days but turned up thinner and crying. Where she went I do not know. I do know I spent countless hours, as did the entire household searching for her and calling by name. I'm sure the neighbors thought us crazy!

Itty Bitty - the last of the two cats we brought back from our tour in Japan - turned fourteen that year and slowly turned from a rather placid fat cat into a crying, lost night wanderer. The only way to console either of them was to put them together in a chair or to hold them! Putting them together helped calm them and us. Then Itty Bitty died last year at the ripe old cat age of 20, so now Precious is only content on my shoulder, under my arm, or curled up outside our house by the front porch (on sunny days).