Missing One March Birthday Boy

It’s been nine months now since we lost our cat Ace. The two of us shared a birthday in March, so several years ago my wife decided to get a photo of the two of us together. After that it became an annual tradition for the two of us to pose together in March. Here’s a pic of us in 2014, when he was two years old.

We didn’t know it then, but we got our last birthday pic together in 2018.

There is hardly a day that goes by when I don’t think of Ace. We always keep our bedroom door closed and cat free, and Ace used to wait for us outside the door every morning. The two of us started the day with a greeting, then it was off to the food bowls for Ace. The two of us also had a number of games we/he liked to play, including ‘food hockey’ where I slid a piece of cat food along the hall and Ace would chase after it. We played that almost every day, and he never got tired of it. Neither did I, for that matter. Skip the toys, all you need is a piece of cat food to play that game! He also liked getting in the pop-up cat cube and playing with a little bouncy ball I would throw to him. He was fun loving, quirky and afraid of his own shadow, and everyone at Happy Acres loved him including Puddin. She actually lost weight after he died when she lost her appetite for food for a couple of months.

In August we got a new kitty we called Ally. We saw her on a local TV station during their Pet of the Day segment, and after meeting her in person at the shelter we brought her home with us. She was small and malnourished when we got her, and only weighed a bit over five pounds. She had all kinds of intestinal parasites, but we nursed her to good health and she now weighs over eight pounds. The vet thinks she will always be a small and petite cat, and so far that appears to be true. They think she was at least a year old when we got her, maybe even older. Amazingly she had already had a litter of kittens. She was brought in to the shelter by someone who found her fending for herself outside. It’s safe to say she had a hard life before we got her.

We’re doing our best to make her life easy. It’s been eight months now, and she has settled in at Happy Acres quite nicely. She often sleeps in the same bowl Ace slept in. It actually fits her better than it did him!

She also love to play, and often romps around the house in mad spurts of energy. She too loves the pop-up cubes, and loves to play with a ball when I bounce it to her. Ally and Puddin get along quite well. They do sometimes sleep together, and one day they were positively all over each other. I was there with the camera that day, and I could not have posed them better if I had tried.

I really hadn’t planned on starting any birthday photo tradition with her. We don’t have a clue when she was born, or even exactly how old she is. But when she jumped up on my chest the other day to give me my birthday greeting, my wife just had to snap a pic of the occasion. Thankfully she is a small cat! She does seem to like to get up on my chest, and occasionally will rub against my beard or even lick my face. She enjoys her lap time, spreading her time between me and my wife. I tell her we should have named her Joy, because she has brought a lot of it into our lives.

So March so far has been somewhat bittersweet for me. I’m another year older, and life is truly good. But I do miss Ace, and that’s ok too. I’ll be back soon with more happenings from Happy Acres!