Introducing…Elijah Moon

In honor of Munchie, a cat who formerly owned a fellow blogger, Pete Denton from Great Britain, and who is now in kitty heaven…..

I’d like to introduce our cat, Elijah Moon. In my opinion, he’s gone through several of his nine lives.  We’d found him living in our crawl space, along with his brother Ezekiel (we didn’t know their names at the time). They were sporting plastic flea collars grown so stiff and tight, they were cutting into their necks. They’d been spayed, so they obviously had belonged to someone at some point in time, but they needed love and attention. So of course we adopted them, took them to the vets, got them their shots.

They joined a household with three other cats: Tarby, my mother’s cat, who lived in our bedroom and didn’t get along with Lucy and Ruckus, who lived in the rest of the house. Elijah Moon and Zeke didn’t get along with anyone, so they stayed outside, living in the yard and on the deck near our back door. We got them two houses to sleep in at night and an umbrella to deflect hot sun and the rain. They seemed to like the accommodations.

At Christmas time of the year we took them in, Elijah Moon and Zeke showed up with very nice collars and name tags. So we finally knew their names. We called the number on the tag. Their owner was a graduate student who had adopted them from a shelter in Providence, Rhode Island. She was off to a post-doc in Berkeley, where her living arrangements didn’t include cats. So she had left them with her mother, who lived about an acre away. Her mother didn’t want them inside because they scratched the furniture, so she dumped them outside and left food for them.

We live in the country and the area is semi-wild. We have tons of deer, raccoons, possums, badgers, beavers, wandering dogs and lately, coyotes. I think Elijah and Zeke took shelter in our crawl space for safety.

Over the last few years, all but one of our cats have died from either cancer or old age, so Elijah or Moonie, as I call him, has moved inside and now enjoys a life of leisure – sprawled on the couch or guarding the yard (until dark, when we bring him in), rolling in the sunshine and eating expensive food. Okay, we spoil him. He also likes to sleep in cozy places, such as the clothes dryer.

We also discovered that he likes water. He only drinks from a faucet, where he gets his water at night before we go to bed, or our pool. He loves the pool. Usually he floats around on a mat while I am swimming, but one really hot day he took a swim. Here he is heading for the side of the pool.  Needless to say he has taken over our lives. We’ve learned to interpret specific mewing noises for what he wants: food, outside, inside, or petting. His wants are simple. Would that ours were!