Mama

Eliza Blue has been worried about Mama Cat for months as she vanished shortly after being spayed. Fortunately, she was just on vacation.

She walked through it with aristocratic grace, just as she has a few thousand times before, and jumped up to the counter immediately with an expectant look on her face. But last week, when I heard a familiar yowl at the bathroom window (Mama Cat’s favorite way to alert me she’d like to come inside), I squealed with joy before racing to greet her. As the kittens grew, Mama Cat began to disappear more frequently. She took over as a full-time grandma, babysitting the kittens one of her daughters (who had evaded capture during the cat spaying roundup) brought to the porch. But after Mama Cat’s last litter of kittens, I decided we just had to take the chance. “If you think about it,” my son said one day this spring, “All the cats on this ranch are kind of related to Mama Cat.”