Goodbye Sweet Kitty

When I was 23 and taking care of my dying grandmother and coming apart at the seams, a friend of mine pretty much tricked me into adopting a kitten. My ex-husband suggested we name her Edelweiss, since that's a famous German flower and my grandmother came from Germany. I was all for it, since I seem to lack the ability to name animals. Less than five months later, my grandmother had died and my husband had left and I was all alone with Edelweiss. For a while there, it felt like she was my only friend

And now, fifteen years later, she's gone.

Since I got my digital camera, most of the photos I'd taken of her were of her sleeping on my bed. I tend to throw stuff on the bed during the day to take care of before the end of the day. I'd often find her taking something over. But with all the stuff in this picture, you can see she preferred my knitting!

The needles didn't seem to bother her! She had odd sleeping habits. I would often come home to find her snoring loudly with her head in one of my sweetheart's shoes.



Ok, I'll admit I was rather miffed the night she vomited in a pair of his slippers as well as one of my high-heeled shoes. Miffed - but it was so outrageous that I'm still laughing about it.



At one point, I thought I had developed a method of reading a book and knitting at the same time. I put the book in a clear plastic bag and that held the book open. There were only two problems. The first was that it took a long time to turn a page. This was the second problem:



Most of her life, I didn't knit. But once I took it up again, I discovered there were times I had to have more than one project on the needles at a time.



She had expensive taste in yarn. That was the one skein of Ultramerino I got from my first Secret Pal.



I tried to make a nice, soft bed for her once. A pillow had come apart in the wash, so I got a good-sized box and put the stuffing down on the bottom for her to curl up on top of. She checked the box out and went somewhere else to sleep. Then it started to get really cold outside and I had the house set a few degrees cooler at night and I thought maybe this would make good insulation. My efforts weren't very pretty, but she approved.



Goodbye, sweet Edelweiss. We miss you.