Old Butterscotch is Leaving Me

Old Butterscotch is dying. I found her laying out across a heat vent. She's laid there for days, rejecting her fluffy fuzzy yellow blanket, in her own carrier, behind the couch--her beloved sanctuary.

She perked up briefly five days ago, when I brought her some chicken hearts. She loves them and always has. But she's stumbled in the rear legs, to walk lately, and moved from the carrier to laying across the vent. I knew she was failing then.

I brought her home chicken hearts tonight. And chicken livers too. It was delusion, to think if I brought them, she'd be alive when I got home. Instead, I pulled her into my arms and held her against my own body heat. A heat vent is such a cold hard cruel piece of metal.

Butterscotch was abandoned on or near the OSU campus. Campus Security fed her. I trapped her only to find out she was already spayed. So I returned her to her life, living beneath the back porch of Fairbanks Hall and being fed by a janitor and campus security.

Four years later, I retrapped her. She'd gotten very ill after bark mulch, alive with bugs and reeking, was dumped all around the back porch of Fairbanks Hall. It made her so sick nobody thought she would live. But she did live. Campus security said they'd find her a home. They didn't. So she's been with me the last three years is it? Or has it been longer?

She almost died last December. My furnace had been shut down as dangerous, at the slum shack where I lived in Corvallis. Then I was evicted. But first, before I was evicted, I told the slumlady about the furnace fire at the bottom and how the gas company came and said it was totally blocked--a fire and carbon monoxide hazard and must be shut down.

She was very upset and said I had ruined her Christmas. Then, just to be mean, she roamed into my bathroom and saw Butterscotch inside the bathroom. She had pneumonia. I had no heat in my place and the bathroom was the only room where I could contain some heat for a very sick old gal, using a space heater.

She said the cats should stay outside and why was there a cat in my bathroom. She's known about my cats since before I moved in. She was saying this right at this time, because she was mad about the furnace, and likes taking things out through intimidation. I tried to explain that Butterscotch had pneumonia and there was no longer any heat in this shack.

She's a grinch, an evil witch, that slumlady. She didn't complain about the new toilet in the bathroom, the toilet I paid for and that I installed because the other one leaked, and the top had broken long before I moved in and replaced by a moldy rotten board. Nor did she complain about the new floor, the floor I paid for and that I put in after ripping out three moldy disgusting fluid filled layers of old vinyl and digging out the rotted boards and mold, so I could breath again in there. She didn't complain about the new doorknob on the bathroom door either, the doorknob I installed, after I came home one night to find myself locked out of the bathroom because the old disgusting nonworking knob had frozen with the lever in the closed position.

She complained about an old kitty, struggling to live, in a freezing disgusting shack this slumlady refused to maintain. An old gal abandoned like trash by someone years before. A humble old stray.

Then came the eviction, when I finally had grovelled long enough and talked back to her. I doubt hell will accept that woman. She's too evil for hell.

The move was hard on me. Harder still on the old cats. Butterscotch took it in stride. She knew as long as she was with me, she was ok.

Tonight she's leaving me. She's leaving me. Leaving me.

She's going away and I can't watch over her, can't hold her, can't tell her how beautiful she is. I can't tell her how sorry I am people treated her the way they did. I can't stop her from going. I want to. I want to.

My dear little campus nobody girl. I was one, too, you know. I was one too.

My little Butterscotch is leaving me. I miss her so already. I miss her. I love her.