Almost a year ago exactly, I wrote about a tiny, cream-and-yellow striped kitten our visiting Italian friend found crying in the corral. The poor thing was smaller than the palm of his hand, minutes old — she still had a damp umbilical cord — and her mother was nowhere to be found. I took her to the house and mixed a bottle of kitten milk replacer for her without a hope in the world that she would survive. She was just too tiny.
She had other plans though. Despite all possible decks being stacked against her, days turned into weeks, and to my surprise, she kept growing and eating.
Her eyes opened, blue as the prairie sky. She started to walk and then run, her round belly dragging on the ground. She started eating kibble soaked in kitten milk and sleeping through the night.
“This kitten has something big to do.” I would tell people, shaking my head in disbelief as I said it. I had no other way to explain the strength of her will to live.
The truth is, I thought maybe her purpose was to take care of me. This was in the midst of my year of mysterious illness, and my own spirit felt weak and frayed. Rescuing her and feeding her around the clock as you must with a kitten that young took a lot out of me, but it was also such a hopeful gesture and it WORKED. Maybe we were meant to save each other, I thought.
Then one of my best friends from college and her husband came for an extended visit and fell in love with the kitten. This was a surprising turn of events because neither my friend nor her husband had had a pet during their adulthoods and had never really wanted to have one. But for some reason, this kitten captured their imagination and they started brainstorming how they could rearrange their lives to include her.
I already had two official house cats, and another unofficial one who was constantly sneaking in trojan-horse-style between the legs of the dogs, plus countless barn cats lounging on the patio furniture, fence posts and garden paths — a veritable embarrassment of cats.
I did not need another cat. But this kitten felt more like my child than a cat, and I didn’t want to let her go. Still, when my friend told me they’d figured out a plan to take her with them — the kitten was going to stay with my friend’s mother-in-law until they moved into a house that allowed cats — I started packing up her tiny kitten toys, the stuffed tiger she’d slept with since birth, the last of her powdered kitten milk and the rest of her bag of kitten kibble.
I cried for two days when she left. I was full of regret. Multiple times over the following weeks, I contemplated jumping in the car and driving through the night to get her back. I would have done it, too, but one thought stopped me: She’d obviously come here to have a big life, and as much as I’d hoped it would be with me, I also felt somehow that she was meant to have a storyline that outgrew me.
A few weeks ago, my friends moved into their new house and brought Dakota — the name they’d given the kitten — home at last.
What we didn’t know last summer — couldn’t possibly have known — is that just days before the move, my friend’s husband would be diagnosed with cancer, and reuniting with Dakota would come at exactly the same time he began navigating treatment.
Since the move, they’ve been sending me pictures of her. She is all grown up now, her bright, slanting eyes are gold instead of blue. She stares at the camera with calm dignity, and in every photo she is snuggled beside my friend’s husband as he rests on the couch or lying with him in bed, tucked into the crook of his knees. Watching over him, just as if it were what she was always meant to do.
