Limerick for Drudge and Serena

Happy Independence Day, fellow Americans! This limerick was prompted by Poets & Storytellers United. Status update is below; adoptable cat and dog photos, for sharing, are below the rant linked here.

With the baby cat's growing and nibbling,

Climbing, scampering, there is no quibbling,

But his moods of inaction

Drive us to distraction.

How we wish that he still had a sibling!

As regular readers know, Serena is the Queen of the Cat Sanctuary. She solved a local crime mystery, last winter, at the risk of her life--solved it by getting people to see what I'd been telling them was there for some time. A crime mystery is not only "who done it" but also "what's done about it." Serena did more to solve that than anyone else did. After exposure to toxins (primarily glyphosate vapors in the air) she has a history of giving birth to kittens who didn't show the Manx gene but either didn't live, or didn't survive their first whiff of glyphosate. 

"So why not have her spayed and spare the drama?" Because the way the Seralini Effect works is that females who inherit this trait survive by eliminating toxins through defective offspring. There are women who say they'd rather shorten their own lives than give birth to babies who can't survive. I can't make that decision for Serena and see absolutely no reason to imagine she'd make it for herself. She loves the kittens she chooses to rear but she wastes no effort on the ones she considers non-viable. In fact I've argued with her and persuaded her to feed a few kittens, including Drudge's late mother Pastel, who Serena initially thought weren't worth feeding.

So last winter I was sure that, if she had kittens, they'd be doomed Seralini kittens. She had three. She tried to keep all three alive, but two just didn't come into this world to stay. If the smallest one lived three months, I said, his name would be recorded as "Miracle."

So far he has yet to claim anything he's been called--Baby Cat, Little One, etc.--as a name. I think he may be waiting to earn the name of Miracle. I'm pretty sure he's going to be a large, perhaps oversized, black "Tuxie" tomcat with a half-tail folded under into something like a rabbit's tail. The tail moves independently from side to side, easily enough, and can be raised or lowered, but can't be straightened.

The kitten does bounce and pounce and climb on things, now and then. Serena thinks he needs more activity. She's cuddled other kittens while they were nursing, in the usual way. With this one she sits down, lets him begin nursing, then jumps up and runs around the office, then sits down and lets him begin nursing again somewhere else, then runs around the office again, and so on. He gets full meals in four or five sittings each. 

Drudge, who is this kitten's nephew, is really too big to play with kittens. Though he was patient and gentle when he was the biggest kitten in the litter, and he's been very patient and gentle with his little uncle, the size difference seems too much to allow them to play as kittens do. Drudge is still growing , even skinny under his fur, but is already longer and taller than all the other cats currently living in the neighborhood--except the baby's father.

The baby's father, whom I call Tarbaby, was visiting the Cat Sanctuary regularly. He wasn't hungry; he was looking for a fight. He inflicted several skin wounds on Drudge before Serena took a stand, for the baby's sake. Serena weighs ten to twelve pounds. Tarbaby weighs, I would guess, fifteen to eighteen pounds, and he didn't obey Serena without a fight, as a tomcat should do. 

"Did Tarbaby do that?" I exclaimed, seeing a skin wound on Serena. "He's going to be neutered."

"Never mind," Serena nonverbally said. "He tried to fight. That's all. I won."