Frances Stebbins
Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
For the first time in more than 60 years, I am living in a home without a cat to keep me company.
Moreover, I’ve prayerfully decided, that getting well into my tenth decade, my brown tabby Dumplet, whose life ended late last year, will be my last.
He was about 15-years-old, having been taken in by a kindly woman once regularly going to the Salem church I attend. She lived at that time in an apartment on East Main Street with several other rescued animals, including a neutered male cat who did not take kindly to this big fellow who was let in out of the cold in the big pre-Christmas snowstorm that hit our area a decade ago.
He was offered to me, a widow living not far away; she had named him Maximus, and later he became Leo. I told her I’d take him over the holidays, though I already owned Gloria and Joy, neutered females with stories of their own.
And so, the big boy entered my life with his cat voice and affectionate manners. He never purred in contentment because he was too busy being social. In all the cats I have loved since my earliest childhood, he was unique. He was friendly to the two females, but calico Manx Gloria feared him, and when I moved to a smaller home around the corner three years later, she took refuge in a “cat house” four feet off the floor and on top of a small bookcase. With her own food station and even a litter box also elevated, Gloria remained safely there for the rest of her long life.
I don’t know how the brown kitty’s name became “Dumplet,” but that happened before with my cats; it stuck until his death from what appears to be a common illness in elderly cats, an over-active thyroid gland. Before his necessary euthanasia at North Roanoke Veterinary Hospital on December 3, he had become “skin and bones” despite a healthy appetite. He survived beautiful Gloria by four months. I’ve told her story previously.
So, it’s sadly quiet around my small home. My three cat-loving neighbors have received my dry food and treats. There will never be another Dumplet. I learned from him how responsive to people a cat can be.
A lot could be said about how important cats – and dogs, of course also, if you are a “dog person” – are, especially to older folk who live alone. The need to have them “put to sleep” is heartbreaking, but necessary for with the practice of neutering and vaccinating that responsible owners make routine, pets occasionally live 20 years or more.
Consequently, my cats in the past three decades have lived well into their “teens“ and generally were euthanized because of cancer or other degenerative ailments.
In my girlhood in rural Virginia, I cried at the loss of relatively young cats in epidemics of respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases that killed them by 10 years. In the Great Depression days, only farm animals got veterinary care.
Seeing a Sunday feature in the daily newspaper a few weeks ago about White Oak trees reminded me that the forest giants with their light gray bark are among the many leafy beauties of my Virginia life.
The story revealed that the commercially valuable oaks are dying out for many reasons mostly related to poor cutting practices that can be remedied.
In my childhood home on the edge of Orange in the Piedmont, four Black Locusts were planted in a semi-circle in the front yard. They varied in size having been planted, I suppose, at different times; they could be seen as the old, the middle-aged and a child. The oldest on the north side of the yard had a good strong limb for a swing which our obliging neighbor hung for me.
My next real encounter with trees started in 1959 when late husband Charlie and I bought our unusual “Roanoke Ranch” style house in the Hollins area. {That’s a house, common in our hilly valley, that is basically a one-story at its entrance level, but has a basement high enough on one side to admit direct sunlight through large windows that make for comfortable living space.
It was there on our three wooded steep acres that magnificent white oaks grew. Being protected from the north winds, two had survived for a century or more. The most handsome in a glade below the house provided a bit of level ground and shade for our three children’s sandbox and swing set.
The other two had religious significance for me. Far down the steep hill on the bank of Carvin’s Creek an oak grew with a large trunk that eight feet above the water divided into three limbs each as huge as many trees. It came to remind me of the Holy Trinity with God as Creator, Son and Holy Spirit ascending far upward.
The top of the third Oak, nearest the house, had been seriously damaged by lightning; eventually, we had it reduced to a high stump. It was under this stump on an autumn afternoon nearly 60 years ago that I count my religious conversion. I felt that, through the Holy Spirit, God lived within me.
