Spring fever and a midlife crisis, kitty-style

We’ve been itching for spring at our house, furry residents included. The dogs live for long walks and days when they’re free to come in and out of the open kitchen door as they please, both cats have been anxious to sit in open windows and watch squirrels, and Willy wants to get out and explore. Yes, now that warm weather is arriving, you, dear readers, will soon get all the details of Willy and Matty’s very first experiences with grass and ground, as we procure kitty harnesses and take the plunge. We feel guilty that we didn’t do this last spring and summer, given that Willy has been waiting patiently for more than a year, so it’s a priority this year. Allow me to explain.

Willy had a rough couple months around the end of 2006 and start of 2007. After he’d taken turns peeing on every dog bed in the house that fall, we took him to the vet. Not-our-regular-vet told us it seemed to be just a behavioral, acting-out problem; Willy clearly was not happy with the dogs. But after he then peed in his sister Matty’s bed the next month, another vet discovered the real problem: bladder stones. Lots of them.

A few hours after we dropped Willy off at the animal hospital that December for his stone-removal surgery, the surgeon called to tell us surgery was a no-go: they’d discovered a heart murmur, and there could be no surgery until that was investigated. January 2007 brought a bunch of tests and a diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a worrisome heart condition that leads Willy’s other human to be overly cautious about his stress levels, but luckily a condition that is in the very early stages, so Willy was given the green light for surgery.

In the days following the surgery, Willy proved to be just fine, still sunbathing where the sunlight hit the carpet in the dining room, still chasing and wrapping himself in his beloved ribbon, still engaging in periodic tiffs with Matty, and still taunting Chance.

But he had an epiphany during all this. He suffered months of painful bladder stones, went under the knife, endured a battery of tests, and heard that he has a heart problem. But none of this fazed him—because, more importantly, in the middle of this, he had seen the outside beyond the tired old view from the living room windows; he had been this close to the outside in all its glory. On one of the many trips back from the vet during these weeks, one of the particularly traumatic visits for him, we let him out of his carrier so that I could hold and comfort him. Suddenly, he could see out the passenger-side window, and watching him was like—well, watching a strictly indoor cat see the outside from a moving car for the first time. Curiosity and wonder overtook him. With eyes wide, he peered up, down, sideways, back, and forth; he stretched his neck this way and that; he tested just about every window he could get to. (Yes, at one point, I lost my grip on his squirming body—horribly, embarrassingly unsafe cat-mom behavior, I know, but I swear this was a onetime event. And I should clarify my position here: letting your cat travel in the car outside a carrier is unsafe, period. Don’t do it, not even once. This was a bad guilt-induced decision on our part.)

But back to Willy’s revelations. I saw the look in his astonished eyes when he turned back to face me after those first few moments of peering out the passenger-side window from my arms. He’d been missing out! For eight years, he’d been doing nothing but sleep, eat, chase a damn ribbon, and stare at squirrels outside the window! He had to take control of his life—experience new things!

So that’s what Willy started doing. First, I caught him sitting with my computer, bills, calculator, and checkbook, studying the numbers. And just days later, I noticed him watching my laptop screen with all too much interest as I corresponded with clients and edited, leaving me with a sneaking suspicion that he was planning a takeover of my freelance business. When we watched Planet Earth, there was Willy, standing directly in front of the TV, studying intently the movements of a mysterious black bird. He was brave enough last summer to wander onto the deck a few times. And a few times early this spring, during brief warm-weather spurts when I had the dogs outside, I caught both Willy and Matty, having jumped the gate intended to keep them on the other side of the house, cautiously approaching the open back door. Willy has evidently filled Matty in on the wonders he saw last year. He knows there’s more, he intends to see it, and he’s taking his sister with him.

But the weather has kept shifting back to cold in the last couple months, and taking a cat with a heart condition and plopping him down outside for the first time in nine years in what to him would be the shocking cold of winter seemed not the best idea. So we have been waiting for full-on spring to arrive, with Willy keeping one eye on the window, tracking the squirrels, and the other on the back door. And finally, spring is here. So stay tuned for the fun of getting cats into harnesses and for Willy and Matty’s great outdoor adventure.

You can e-mail Stephanie at mail@stephanie-ernst.com