An empty porch...

...that's what it feels like on our porch now-- empty. It's been a week since I brought our cat Gatsby to the vet to have him 'put down.'  After three episodes of vestibular seizures, each one being worse than the previous episode, having Gatsby put to sleep seemed to be the right solution to what would be an on-going and incurable problem.

For nearly as long as we've been in this house, Gatsby was just always here. Outside most of the time, unless it was just flat-out freezing, Gatsby was like the mayor of this property-- always visible, always waiting for us, always there. I can't begin to count the number of times I nearly tripped over that cat because he chose to walk so close to me as I went from one end of the yard to the other. "Kill me now, Gatsby, just kill me now!"-- that's what I would tell him because I'd get so frustrated when I had to quickly side-step around him so he wouldn't make me fall. And there were days that I just picked Gatsby up and carried him from one end of the yard to the other, just so I could get to where I needed to go without the walk taking three times as long as it would have if Gatsby had been down by my feet the whole way.

And the days when my husband and I would go out for lunch or into town for errands... when we pulled back into the driveway, there was Gatsby, sitting there waiting by the walkway with a serious expression on that round cat-face of his... as if he were saying "Where did you go and what took you so long?"

Our other outside cat Mickey is still walking around the backyard and the porch, wailing and meowing... and I know for certain that he's looking for Gatsby.  Those two cats spent the nights together in the garage, and shared the fenced-in coop during the sunniest part of the every day, and they each had pillow-beds on top of a table on the back porch for afternoon naps. Gatsby was always in the largest bed, and Mickey was more comfortable in the smaller one. Ever since Gatsby has been gone, I haven't once seen Mickey curled up in his own bed... he's taken to napping in Gatsby bed now.

If you're a pet-lover, then pets become part of your family, and that's how it's always been with us. Gatsby was part of our little family and a fixture on this property and now that he's not here anymore, his absence is more apparent than his presence was.  The fact that Gatsby was always on the porch or always by the driveway waiting for us was a given and something that I thought would just always be. Well, it's not a 'given' any longer, and that porch is just not the same without that big old Russian Blue cat that we called The Gray Gatsby.

Kill me now, Gatsby... the memory of you is killing me now.