My Third Cat My Deepest Cut

About a month into our holiday, we were told Jake had not returned home for almost a week. Like Spikey, we looked everywhere for him with no luck. Jake, too, was gone. It was heartbreaking.

No more cats, I said.

But we were now used to having a fluffy in the house. Even if we missed Spikey and Jake, we wanted to fill the void.

I was skeptical and scared, but I gave in and got another beautiful black and white, friendly cat.

Naming him was difficult; we battled from Oreo to Morgana, but the names didn’t fit. And then one day at a restaurant, my daughters ordered Sprite.

Sprite

“Sprite,” I said. “That would be a beautiful name for a cat.” They all agreed with me, and our new and third cat was baptized.

Like Spikey and Jake, Sprite liked welcoming us home by wagging his tail or meowing.

Then one day, I came home alone expecting his usual appearance, but he did not show up.

I called him several times and looked in every corner I thought he could be, but I got nothing. Something is wrong, I said to myself already getting nervous.

Silos

We live in the Italian countryside surrounded by farms producing rice, maize, soya, milk products, etc. In our complex, there’re two rice-storing silos. These silos are huge, cylindrical, and cone-shaped inside and at the bottom, with various windows on the sides.

As I kept calling Sprite, suddenly, I heard distant and desperate meows, like in response to my calls.

I couldn’t figure out from where they were coming, though. I then noticed that one silo’s window was open. The meows were coming from that direction. I rushed over and looked inside the silo. My heart skipped. Sprite was stuck inside and at the bottom.

I panicked. How am I gonna get him out? I asked myself.

I sprinted home,  grabbed the snow shovel, and placed it as far to the bottom as possible. Sprite instantly understood what I was trying to do. He moved in front of the shovel, and as I kept pulling it up, he moved without slipping back down into the deep hole.

When I got him out, he wagged his tail and moved around my legs several times before returning home. What a relief.

In the early summer of 2021, we left Sprite at home alone for a few days, my neighbours taking care of him. When we got back, we noticed an angry attitude about him. Like he was upset–cat owners can tell this. But it was only for a few days.

Unfortunately, we had to leave him again for our long summer holidays, as we couldn’t take him with us far and across borders.

This time I decided to leave Sprite home in his environment instead of taking him to our relative’s house. The girl next–door, Irene, would take care of him, including opening the house if he wanted to go in.

Our house is next to a bustling country road.

We don’t know how often or if ever Sprite had crossed that road.

A few days before our departure, Sprite became indifferent again.

He was distant and stayed away from home most of the time. But our neighbours loved him, he made himself cosy in many of their houses, so he was fine.

Since we were leaving, I had already purchased everything Sprite would need while we were away. Irene, too, had started playing with him occasionally, so he got used to her.

But just a day before our departure at about six in the morning, I got a message from one of our neighbours.

“Is Sprite at home?” The message asked.

“I don’t think so. He’s always out at night in the summer,” I replied.

“Please, check. A cat was hit on the road. It looks like him.”

My heart sank! But I refused to accept it could be Sprite. There was no way we were losing yet another cat again in such a short time. So I continued with my morning routine, only to be met by another neighbour telling me about the cat that got hit on the road.

I had to face reality eventually.

Later that morning, I trudged to the road to check the cat out because if it was Sprite, I had to take him off the road anyway and bury him somewhere.

It was him. My eyes were full of tears as I picked up his stiff body with the same shovel I had used to rescue him from the silo a few months ago, to take him to his final resting place.

But there was another challenge. I now had to face my girls, Isabel and Giorgia, who had been sleeping late since it was the summer holidays, to tell them their much-beloved fluffy was no more.

They came down the stairs slowly, still in their pajamas. We all hugged in sadness, the pain of that loss so evident.

Sprite’s death hurt so bad that I swore never again to get another cat. But it was such a difficult promise to keep.

That summer of Sprite’s death, we were in Colombia. One day while taking an early morning walk with a friend, we stumbled upon a clowder of cats. They were mostly newly born kittens, so adorable. One of them would become our cat number four- a lovely white cat with a black mark on the front.

Lucky