Elevate

Today’s Daily Prompt: Elevate  That’s my job several times a day.

Our 19-year-old cats, Jules and Lucy made their debut in Living with Elder Cats.

Since she was a kitten, Lucy has had a great fondness for drinking out of the faucet. Lets be more specific here, since she is. She likes to drink out of the faucet on the left hand side in the master bedroom. Her preference is to be attended while she does this, with gentle slow stroking of her back as she laps from a slow, but not too slow, drip.

The upstairs sink is her primary, although on occasion she will deign to drink from the main floor bathroom sink. Those fancy fountains for cats with the circulating water? Forget it. I’ve tried a few models and she won’t go near them, I suspect it’s the motor which is off-putting, although it could be pure cat contrariness. Or as Lucy puts it, “I’m snickety” that’s short for persnickety in our house feline dialect.

Also when she was a kitten, Lucy had an encounter with antifreeze, licking a bit off the garage floor. We discovered this when her pre-spay blood work showed near complete kidney failure. Remarkably, this almost entirely resolved. Since then, she’s needed to drink a lot of water to compensate for this insult to her kidneys. Hence all the drinking fountain experiments.

At nineteen, Lucy is less agile than she once was, only occasionally able to make the jump onto the counter herself. Over the last year, she’s allowed me to lift her up to the counter for her drink. She’s gone from complaining when I first started lifting her to now yelling from the bedroom when she’s ready for a drink.

When we got this set of kittens nineteen years ago, I knew that they’d have an impact on my life. To me, that’s the point of relationships. It didn’t occur to me that I’d become an elevator operator.