Skeeter came to us four years ago. We had an outdoor cat that visited us every day because we would leave her a bowl of food outside. She became pregnant and when she had her kittens next door in the barn, a large dog killed all but one of her kittens. One evening she left the last small black kitten under our back porch and left never to be seen again. We tried for two weeks to get that kitten inside the house. My sweet husband would lie on the back porch waiting for that kitten to take the bait of food so that he could catch him. Try as he might, though, he continually evaded him. Scott got more mosquito bites than imaginable trying to catch that cat. We changed our tactics and tried to lure him into the house with the food while we hid. It did the trick. He came in and we had a new member of our family. We called him Skeeter in honor of how many "squiter" bites Scott got. He hid under a cupboard and when we got him out, we put him into a large coat closet until he could acclimate to us (and learn to use a litter box!) Many months later, he decided that it was safe enough to start coming out. He was always a scaredy cat - he preferred to sleep on the beams in the old house. He would come into the kitchen occassionally and sit on my lap in my rocking chair or on the back of the chair and look out the window while I was in it. A year after we got him, we thought we would get him a girl cat so that we could have kittens. We bought a beautiful grey and white cat that we were told was a girl and we named her Duchess in honor of the name we gave Skeeter's mother. However, Suprise! she ended up being a "he" and we changed his name to Spot. When Spot was full grown, we started having all sorts of territorial problems and they both went in to be "fixed". At that time we found out that our scaredy cat had a heart murmur and the vet told us he was lucky to be alive. When we moved, he seemed to adapt alright at first, but with the dogs and the other cats, Skeeter started living more and more under the bed. We did what we could to encourage him to come out but it was difficult. One day last week, he came out and went to his bowl in our bathroom and started meowing oddly. He never left that bathroom again. For the first day, he just seemed to have a bit of an upset stomach, but he couldn't use the bathroom very well. The next day he could hardly move and a day later he died. It was horrible and it was so quick. I am not sure what happened to him or why he died. He did seem to be in a lot of pain the last few hours, though, and I am glad that it didn't last long. Out of all of our animals, he was mine. I will miss him. He was a good friend. Goodbye Skeety. (Summer 2002 - Oct. 10, 2006)
