Miranda's Revels

My daughter has an elderly cat named Miranda. Everybody thinks their own cat is a particularly special one, but Miranda who is, of course, not my cat, has had something of an unusual life. She was born in Minnesota and entered my daughter’s family life in the course of some personal sadness and that may be why, although she was never my cat, I had a particular fondness for her even though I’m not particularly a cat person, not least because I have a mild allergy to cat hair. After a few years of graduate student-apartment life in Minnesota, Miranda and her family moved to Washington, D.C., where she lived in a bigger apartment with a new kitten named Fenton. But in between Minnesota and D.C., Miranda spent a year with my son when my daughter and her husband went to Germany. At my son's 5-acre place, Miranda learned to catch mice and run wild in the tall grasses. But after that year was over, she returned easily to apartment living.

A few more years and a baby, and Miranda and Fenton, the baby, and the grownups moved on to a small town in Missouri on the Mississippi river. There, Miranda had the run of an entire house and, on occasion, a stroll in the yard with real grass and flowers. But she never went out of the yard by choice. She’s a pretty cat, but of an ordinary appearance in the grey stripe direction as you can see in the picture above. She watched birds right close out the window there in Missouri. She met and took no liking to yet another baby. She wasn’t all that crazy about the first one or about Fenton, either, but she tolerated them all in that superior way that cats have. On the other hand, she loved my daughter and my son-in-law.

Then, one day, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, when she was around ten years old, she walked out the door one day and didn’t come back. Days passed; no sign, no collection by the cat pick-up people, no news. No Miranda. Well, of course, there were plenty of cars around, and the town, while not rural in any way, has wildlife that could easily provide the end of Miranda. So there was mourning for Miranda. Then, many months later, Miranda reappeared. Wherever she had been, she was now home, but she was living in a drainpipe in the small woodsy area behind the house. She was sleek, well-fed, and self-sufficient, with no interest whatsoever in returning to the life of a house cat.

Over time, she did come to live nearer to the house and, finally, in the garage, at least in the winter. She accepted cat food as within her wild animal definition of okay food. She even let the children (and me) pet her now and then, though she definitely showed no interest in reigniting her relationship with Fenton who is a solid housecat in every sense of the word. She was in this domestic world, but she was not OF this domestic world, she made clear.

Last night, I received an email from my daughter with the picture of Miranda admiring some flowers a month or so ago. My son-in-law had found the cat dead in the yard that evening. She was 17 years old. Miranda’s revels now are ended, but I am very happy to have known a cat even slightly who had those kind of revels, who appears to have found--on her own initiative--exactly the life she wanted and was willing to undergo extraordinary changes to have it. She was a cat who, late in life, went on a quest and, in some sense, came back with the grail.