Seven Cats to be Fixed Tomorrow

Tomorrow, seven cats will be fixed. I have donations to cover most of the fixes. Here is the list: One Sweet Home logger boys Lynx Point Siamese female. One BS colony gray female (this cat had gone missing from the colony mid summer and only recently reappeared--cat number 92 fixed there); orange tabby on white tom, from Waverly Waifs; Calico adult feral, from Waverly Waifs; Owned black and white Lebanon male; gray tabby on white male kitten, from Waverly Waifs colony (the other three kittens, two girls and a boy, were fixed Wednesday); Bucky, the long hair male white kitten abandoned on 34th street.

The latter two kittens I am taking to Greenhill to be fixed through fellow cat trapper/fixaholic Larissa, of West Fir, since they are underweight to do at Countryside. The other option is to take them clear to Tigard.

Larissa is unbelievable. She probably curses me nights, but I got her started in this cat fixing obsession. She answered an ad another friend posted at the West Fir post office, about barn cats I had. It was my ad. I was trying to relocate Koos warehouse cats. She took four I think, in the end. I explained to her what I do. So she gets a trap and starts out and now has eclipsed me.

She has her own nonprofit, FAN, in West Fir, and hooked up with Greenhill to do a lot of cats each week and is even paid by Greenhill for staying to work as a surgery assistant for the day. Oh, that this county had such programs.

My roots are West Fir. The mill she sometimes discusses in her own blog is the mill where my grandfather worked. An uncle died at 17 years of age when he was driving around the mill pond and his car plunged into the pond. My father used to talk of it, since this was an older brother he loved. He can still remember how the mill whistles blew.

I know about mill whistles, growing up in a mill town. They'd blow at shift changes and closing time and anytime they blew in between those times meant "accident". So everybody dreaded the sound of a mill whistle at off hour.

So my deep roots are West Fir. And Larissa lives next to the ruins of that mill my grandfather worked and where my Uncle died at age 17. My grandfather helped build the covered bridge there in West Fir, too, my father said. When she takes walks, she treads on ground my family worked and lived upon. She picks through artifacts of that mill and I wonder sometimes if what she picks up is something one of my family members touched long ago. My grandparents had ten or twelve kids. A set of twins died of measles when four years old. Then the other uncle died at 17. So three of them never made it to adulthood.

Anyhow......