Animal Soul Mates...

11 Dec '06 5:24 am

Since I was little my life has been full of animal presence. Then, it was mostly homeless animals, lovely passers-by in m my everyday life...Due to my parents'professions we moved very often from town to town, and it was not practical those days to have a pet under such conditions... Especially in Greece...

But in my adult life - married, things changed. We moved from house to house (..to let), and we only once changed a town -- from the northern beautiful Thessaloniki we moved to Athens. So , apart from the everyday contact with the homeless animals, my little family started having pets,...cats, apartment cats at the beginning. All of these animals proved to be my ..soul mates! Meaning a sort of extension of my body and soul ..in a cat bodily form! Absolutely attached mainly to me of all the family members, having a constant talking - miawing communication with me, and a deep body-mind-and-spirit contact! Yes! I know it sounds absurd, but it is exacly like this, and I am sure many of you have exactly such a deep relationship with your pets! And it is a blessing, believe me.

First in our pet life was the adorable Hermes, called after the beautiful ancient Greek god. His body was a white, long, refined body of an ancient Egyptian cat, while having a stripped bonet on the head and a stripped long tail. His gorgeous eyes were like the Nefertiti's eyes! His mum was a gorgeous Siamese with turqoise eyes and his dad a huge snowy-white male cat with eyes of different colours : the one it was golden, the other sky-blue! They were both living in our apartment building. Hermes proved to be the perfect apartment cat! The best friend of the children's plays, adoring making crazy rides in the apartment on the puppet pram of little Alexandra! Adoring watching children having fun during birthday parties, participating himself in the most genious ways! He was my first animal soul mate... And here he is :

11 Dec '06 5:44 am

When Hermes died because of a strange viral disease, I fell into a black depression for two months.. And then, my parents took me to a vet of their neighbourhood, where I met Tsika! A grey, lovely female kitten of two months.. A psychologue friend had told them I needed again an "animal involvement"...Tsika proved to be the most unsociable and frightened animal I met in my life... From the moment the vet put her in my arms, she clung around my neck and started purring loudly...Since then she was my shadow, sleeping always in my bedroom, following me everywhere.. We even spent some of our summer holidays together...When I was sad crying, she used to come on my lap, and start leaching soothingly my running tears with her tongue, miawing tenderly... She followed us here to Belgium and died of old age last February. She was 22 years old. Here she is :

11 Dec '06 6:06 am

Then , after a year and half Tsika was with us, Jeany came into our lives. I was cleaning our balcony after I had finished watering the plants, when I perceived two youngsters in the open space in front of me, playing a sort of tennis, using a strange black ball. I suddenly realized with horror, that the "ball" was a tiny black animal!! I just don't remember how fast I ran to them ...my eyes full of tears and horror! Screaming onto the children's faces I asked them " how they could possibly do such a thing"!! I took the animal from the ground, who was shaking.. It was a tiny kitten , no older that 10 days old, the one eye still shut, the tiny tail broken...I hold her in my arms and went straight to a pet shop , where I bought a milk powder for.." orphan animal babies", and a special milk bottle. Whenever the baby Jeany was finishing drinking her milk, her belly...was becoming bigger than her head!...Jeany has been a very independent cat, a great mum (once), with a very strong personality! She does not like visitors generally, and thinks she is a... big guardian dog, especially when I garden in the front gardens...She attacks all the dogs passing quietly with their owners (which makes me furious!)-- only when I garden in the front gardens... She is my only cat still being alive .Here she is:

11 Dec '06 6:28 am

As I told you before, Jeany became a mum just once. She gave birth to four adorable tiger coloured kittens. We were still living in an apartment building then. Two boys, two girls.. Of them, one was Tina. My beloved Tina! Tina and her sister Frankie followed us here to Belgium with the rest of my cats then...What a lovely, lovable being! Always good-humoured, always playing like a kitten , until she died last July, 17 years old.. She was the most extrovert of all my cat family members, the most sociable.. She was a charmer, and all the males of our neighbourhood fell in love with her -- she was castrated , of course... But some of the lovers chased her into the house some ...annoying spring-summer nights...And she also thought she was a ...big guardian dog, while I was gardening in the front gardens... When Nicholas was a baby, Tina and Jeany loved to follow me with Nicholas sitting on his pram, during long dinstances, just like two...dogs...Here she is :

11 Dec '06 7:11 am

The last house we had before moving to Belgium was a small two-storey house in the green northern suburbs of Athens. There my everyday contact with homeless animals was non-stop.. So, one cold Autumn night I went to the garage looking for something. And there he was! The ...soulest of my animal soul-mates : my sweet, adorable, round, cute, Moraki (meaning Baby-faced)!! He was miawing to me shyly and a little frightened , with that funny, thin voice... His eyes running, his nose blocked. A very ill kitten of around two months old... Alexandra and myself cured him, and soon he became a formal member of the family, moving with us to Belgium. He was so funny with his huge, round body and his short legs... Watching him running to me from afar in the garden , was the funniest of spectacles...But his face!...Oh, how I adored his beautiful face with those turqoise Nefertiti's eyes ...penetrating my eyes! And how I respected his exceptional, charismatic cat character : the personification of cat gentleness and self-sacrifice! Together with Tsika, they were the... soulest of my animal soul-mates. He died of heart problems two years ago..

11 Dec '06 10:56 am

Those are lovely photos of beautiful cats. I can see why you loved them so much. Smile

I've only ever had two cats, not counting the kittens they had. My parents were bird lovers and we were never allowed to have cats when we were growing up.
I understand why they felt the way they did as now that my last (and first) cat has died I don't intend to replace her as we also want to encourage the birdlife, but I do miss having a cat around the place.

Firstly I'll introduce you to Barrel. She was named this as being that she was my first ever cat I had no idea how much to feed her as a kitten, so she became quite tubby around the middle. One of my flatmates said she looked like a Barrel and the name stuck.
(I originally tried to call her Berenike after one of the Cleopatras. I'd been watching a series called 'The Cleopatras' at the time)

Secondly there was Kitten, Barrel's daughter.
Barrel had 5 kittens who all found homes, then we had Barrel 'fixed' (which I should have done earlier as I don't believe in adding to the ever growing cat and dog population, but I slipped up. Twice. As Kitten had her own brood later on. Oops.).

Kitten started life as 'Bonnie'. One of her brothers was identical to her except for the feet markings and we called them Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde later became Scampi, and Kitten wouldn't answer to her name but instead answered to the title of 'kitten' and it too stuck.

11 Dec '06 7:50 pm

Stories that are sad and happy .Our pets are our most loyal companions indeed .Hot water bottle??? We had a cat once who used to snooze on bicycle seats .What characters they are .
These are my last two ,when they were both young .Lindy ,the West highland white terrier died a year ago .Her best friend ,Zoe, misses her terribly ,and still goes and lies on Lindy's favourite spots around the house.
Dixie.

11 Dec '06 7:53 pm

They both used to accompany me on walks around the farm.
Here we are stopping for a rest .
Dixie

11 Dec '06 9:16 pm

Anna and Dixie, I just loved your pet-stories and photos!! I adored the Lindy-Zoe on chair, and Kitten photos ! Thank you for sharing your pet- stories with mine! It s so sad when they pass away our beloved companions! And so many things to learn from them while they are alive! They say , that little children learn to really respect and love their fellow human beings, if they grow up by loving and respecting correctly their own pets first...But their parents should be the first positive and living examples for them, concerning the true love and respect for animals and Life in general...Families of young children and educators at schools have to cooperate and coordinate constructively and practically towards their common target aim : the true respect of all that is Life! Respectful adults had been respectful children first...

12 Dec '06 3:23 am

Oh what lovely and poignant stories! And every one of the animals shared here is just beautiful – I could rhapsodise on them for hours! Very Happy

As to my own animal soul mates, my first was Bonnie, a West Highland White Terrier, who my parents got when I was just two and a half years old. We sort of grew up together and so it’s the most natural thing in the world to me to have animals around. I do think that I may have been a little over-enthusiastic at times when trying to pet her and hug her, being so young Very Happy

. Mum was definitely the one she looked up to the most, but there was definitely a very strong bond between us, as we were kind-of the babies of the family, and I always loved to go walking with her in the woods near our house when I was a little older.

When I was about 16, though, Bonnie started to have seizures (similar to, but not actually epilepsy) which were horrible to witness, and she had to be put down Sad

. This was my first real experience of death; my eldest brother had had a rabbit and a guinea pig and my sister and I had both had hamsters which had all died and I was always very sad, but I couldn’t in all honesty call them soul mates. I too fell into a period of deep depression at that time.

After a couple of years, though, Mum and Dad decided it was the right time to have some more animals in the house and they got another Westie, called Sherry, and a Cairn called Misty (I just found out when I visited them in October that Misty is actually his family name – only ten years later! Rolling Eyes

). Sherry had problems when she was a puppy – a hole in the heart and encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) – and we didn’t think she was going to make it, but she pulled through and has since been the picture of health (if a little chubby! Laughing

).

Although they now live 220 miles away, there’s still an understanding between us and they’re always pleased to see me which is lovely Very Happy

. I remember after I’d left school and was working but still living at home, when I came home from work, as soon as I put my key in the door, they’d be there ready to greet me which always has and always will take at least 10 minutes and Sherry then would take my fingers in her teeth (gently!) and lead me, bent double – she’s only about a foot tall – to Mum as if to say “look who I’ve found, Mum!!” Laughing

. The lovely thing is that their greeting hasn’t changed one bit since I got married and moved out.

When I did marry, hubby and I always said we’d have animals one day, but we just didn’t do anything about it for a few years. One day, though, there was a tiny little cat wandering around the busy streets of the market town where I work, and I and my colleagues were so worried that it would get run over, we took it into the office and put a note on the door in an attempt to find her owners. Unfortunately no-one came to claim her (we think they probably moved away and just left her Evil or Very Mad

), so my boss’s wife took her home and it turned out that she was pregnant. I told hubby about this a short time afterwards and he was really keen to see if we could have a couple of the kittens, but unfortunately they had all been “reserved” by then. Luckily, though, she had a friend whose cat was also expecting kittens so I phoned that lady and arranged to visit them. We needed to check whether we would be allergic to them or not, as we have both been before with other animals, but there was no reaction which made us think even more that it was “meant to be”, and we just adored all five of the kittens, and would have taken them all with us there and then if we could but, seeing as they were our first animals (except the snakes, of course!) without parents’ help, we chose just the two – a couple of little boys.

We often say that Wooster is the best mistake we ever made because, when we got them home, we discovered that one of our little boys was, in fact, a little girl! Of course we would have loved any animal we had, but now we just couldn’t imagine our lives without our little Wooster! Very Happy

There is a quote which I think sums up all that has been said here in this thread so far:

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” ~ Jean Cocteau

Here are some photos of my animal soul-mates, although not all, as I don't have any of Misty or Sherry in digital format - must remedy that asap!

Animal Soul Mates...

Animal Soul Mates...

stories

companions

Pet love-stories and true respect for Life!