My Mother’s Life Revealed in Her Stories About Cats

The old folder lurked in the back of my storage shelves. Thirty years had passed since I had filled it with papers found among my mother’s things. My aunt had convinced my mother to write a story about the cats she had when she was a child. Was this it?

She had used a pencil and whatever scrap paper was available. The faded and crumpled pile was a challenge to decipher. The pages were unnumbered, some duplicative. I did find a title page — “Cats I Have Known and Loved” — but beyond that, it was a maze. I concluded that any resurrection would be a long winter project.

I recalled arriving home one day and finding her with old black and white photos strewn all over the living room table, captions carefully written on the back of each. Ah! I still have those photos.

I sorted the pages out on my big front table and ordered the old photos by subject and date. I started typing up her stories, editing as I went. I worked on it on and off for months.

What I discovered was a family treasure. These were not just cat stories. My mother had recited her own childhood story, with events embellished with cats. I ended up with 36 pages full of people, places … and cats.

For years, her family journeyed between Louisiana and Texas, following her father’s locomotive machinist jobs that were part of the logging industry. It was the Depression era. I had never realized how many times she had moved and changed schools and had to make new friends.

Every time the family started packing up, the mama cat would load her kittens in the moving boxes. You could find a kitten among the dishes.

In the early days, she was crippled by polio. Her brother would pull her around in a little wagon, and his cat always joined the outing. She called these their hikes.

My mother wrote about one big house the family rented, an old plantation home. The children were convinced that the thumping and banging they heard in the attic was caused by ghosts. Then they discovered that the family cat of the time was eliminating the resident rat population, dragging the large carcasses across the floor.

When her father was unemployed, the family stayed with relatives. She told how her mother would visit local farms with the little kids and a cat in the back seat, trading for food and essentials. There were stories of the headlights going out and the car ending up in a ditch, cats howling in protest in the back.

I suspect that one reason my mother married my father was that his parents had a cat. When she met her new in-laws, their cat came up to inspect her. She passed.

Mary McCutcheon and current cat Marvin live in Eureka.