The things you can find in my shed

Meet Dirty Kitty. She's the little stray that adopted me a little over a year ago. Literally. She walked up to me, climbed my leg, rested her head on my shoulder, and from there on out, she has claimed residence on my porch, or somewhere in the vicinity of my house. She's not the sweetest cat in the world, but she's certainly not feral.

You'd think that working for a vet's office, I'd have had her spayed by now, but to be quite honest, I haven't really got the resources to be taking in every stray that wanders this way, and I've resigned myself to simply being a food source for her, and not getting emotionally attached.

But time works strange magic on you, doesn't it? More and more often we find ourselves saying "Have you seen Dirty Kitty today?" or "I'm going to go check on Dirty Kitty. It's sort of cold out tonight."

Well, as all unspayed little kitties will do, she turned up looking quite a bit larger than usual one day, and we all knew what was coming. What we didn't know is that she'd pick the coldest, windiest night of the year to have them. Actually, she may have had them the night before, during the torrential downpour, hail, and lightning storm. Either way, her timing sucked.

But when I came home from work yesterday and she wasn't sleeping in her usual place behind the grill, and wasn't chilling in the shade under the RV, I knew she'd gone into labor. I also knew that the kittens didn't stand a chance of survival if they were out in the elements.

So, in the dark, in the cold, in the windy yuck that was last night, I waited, rattling her bowl and waiting for Dirty to come home for some food. Eventually, it paid off, and my suspicions were correct--she had had the kittens.

I sat patiently, in the cold, in the wind, in the dark, and tracked her back to her babies.

She surprised me, though, and proved to be a smarter Mama than I had anticipated. She had them in a box in my shed, under my table, behind all of J's outgrown toys.

I guess she knew I wasn't threatening to her babies because, although she won't let me pick her up now that she's an adult, she allowed me to wrangle the box out from under the table, and bring it, the kittens and her inside.

My hall bath is now a temporary nursery until I can come up with a better solution. And while I never planned on getting involved with any of this, and I always swore I'd just let nature take it's course, I have to admit that they are the cutest darn babies I've ever seen.

All but one have manx tails. How odd.