Rhianna

Early last week, there was a shift somewhere in my being very much to the positive. I felt energetic for the first time in ages and I felt good. It’s not so much I’d been feeling bad all along. Just that feeling so energetic was such a good feeling that it made me realise how lacking I’d felt before. I couldn’t say what the cause of this was but it was a good thing.

The feeling carried on through the week.

Friday, everything changed. A phone call came reporting someone having found our cat in the road. The Scientist went out and found her on the edge of our front yard and she had died. We don’t really know what happened, except she had some injuries on her chest and around her front legs.

Rhianna was our first permanent pet in the family. We got her over ten years ago because Lego Lover was afraid of dogs at the time. He was pretty attached to her, especially these last years as he’s gotten older. She was never a particularly attached cat. Most of the time she was quite aloof and the only time she showed much affection was once the dogs joined the family and that tapered off after a while. I had attempted to show her more attention in more recent months or maybe even the last year or so but it was never as much as it should have been. Part of this was just because she wasn’t too attached to people. But she also kind of got a bad deal with the dogs joining the family. It might have been better had one of the dogs not taken an active dislike to her once she scratched him for getting to close.

It’s funny how little we realise a creature is so much a part of our lives until it is gone. She used to follow the Scientist around the front yard while he watered the plants. When I got up most days, there’d be evidence she’d been sleeping on my desk chair. Funnily enough, I had to get a new one a while back and she didn’t start sleeping there for a while. But then she took it over pretty much every night. Of late, I’d come out to find heaps of sand and cat hair all over it. Then, of course, there was the clawing of the front screen, which was her way of saying she wanted yet more food. Sometimes she’d hide away in our closet to sleep and the only evidence was we’d hear her bell tinkling as she shifted around a bit. And sometimes our bedroom would be her safe place from the dogs. Fluttershy always loved her to death, which was bearable, if annoying. Maromi often kept his distance but then would become aggressive with her.

When she ate, she was very careful and dainty as she ate. This became most apparent when we had neighbour cats turns up and sneak in to eat her food. We’d suddenly hear a noisy, messy sound of eating which was definitely not her. We also never we able to feed her any cat treats. She would never take food from our hand. If we gave her anything, we pretty much had to put it in her dish or she wouldn’t bother with it.

We are pretty sure she actively tormented Maromi by walking across the front yard when he was there, setting him off to bark madly at her. She knew she was safe from him out there and she took full advantage of it. She also had a cat “friend” which she would tolerate hanging out in our yard. They would sit or lie down not too far from each other. Sometimes one would be on one side of the driveway and the other on the opposite side.

Once, she disappeared for about day and we worried about her well-being. She was very much an outdoor cat and hated being forced to stay inside. So she wandered around our yard and the neighbouring yards. She never went too far, so much as we knew. Anyway, when she didn’t show up, we were worried that she might have walked into the street gotten hit by a car. She was found quite by accident in one of the drawers in Game Fanatic’s room. I think the drawer had been sitting open for some reason and somebody closed it, not realising she was in there. But we never heard a peep from her. We guessed she was doing a lot of sleeping at the time but it was weird she never cried to get out. What a relief it was when she was discovered.

I don’t have that many photos of Rhianna because she was rather difficult to pin down for a photo. The last photo I have is quite by chance and accident. I was taking a photo of a flower in the front yard and she walked into the frame. It’s kind of a neat photo, for being an accident and I’m glad I have it. It kind of suits her since she wasn’t very affectionate.