Muffin

Some call her Snow White. I call her Muffin. Jason calls her Cotton. Whatever her name really is -- she's the neighborhood cat.

I don't remember when it was exactly that she began to grace us with her presence. Maybe four months ago? That's seems about right. She showed up in our neighborhood as if she had always been there. As if she had always owned this street.

I admit when I first met her I felt sorry for her. She was a mess of fluffy white cotton hair caked with mud and specks of leaves and sticks tangled throughout her coat. Her big yellow green eyes drew pity out of any one who locked eyes with her. She couldn't have been a whole year old, maybe six months. Her skinny little body made you wonder just how long it had been since her last meal.

I decided to take her on. I grab two bowls from inside and filled one with water and the other with some of Murphy (our inside cat)'s food. Jason couldn't believe what I was doing and said that before long I would become the neighborhood cat woman. But she's could die, I told him. She would starve, no one is taking care of her...

That's how is started. That was Muffin in her first days in our neighborhood. Over the next few weeks a unique transformation took place...

At first I noticed a love or a hate for muffin from our surrounding neighbors. She ate their plants. She harassed their dogs. They sprayed her with hoses. Some had adopted her as their own. Some had even named her Snow White which I thought was a ridiculous name. She was not Snow White and I would never call her that. One week, a pink flea collar showed up on her neck from the neighbor two doors down that's when I realized that Muffin's visit to our neighborhood was more permanent than anyone had hoped for.

Once Muffin knew she had us, it all went down hill from there. One day I was driving home from work and as I neared our house I saw her walking down our driveway. She'll move, I thought. Cat's are good about dodging cars for the most part. As I pulled my car into the drive. She didn't move. In fact she wouldn't budge. I honked and she sat there staring at me. Finally, I threw half of my body out of the car door and fussed at her. She moved alright, but only after minutes of fussing went by and aggravated drivers lined their cars up behind mine.

That wasn't the only thing.

The ragged washed up Muffin from the early days was no longer visible. Muffin was looking good. Her once tattered coat was a puffy fluff of pure cotton. She was beautiful. But noticing the change in her appearance made me notice something else just as important - her stomach.

Muffin's stomach was growing at an alarming rate. Is she pregnant, we wondered. We - meaning all the neighbors were noticing it too. Muffin's possible pregnancy was the topic of conversation among the neighbors for days. We wondered how many kittens she would have, we wondered where she would have them, and we wondered who had claim to which one of the kittens she would have. Would they be all white like she was or would they look like the father whoever he was. It never dawned on us that she wasn't pregnant.

Muffin's fat belly was the result of her dining habits. One weekday night when the neighbors sat on their porch swings and watered their gardens the truth came out. As one neighbor placed a bowl of food for Muffin on her porch it started a "You feed Snow White (Muffin)?!, well so do I!". Muffin had been making the rounds. Literally. She started on our side of the street in the mornings and crossed the street to hit up some houses in the afternoon.


I knew all to well the guilt she caused. I too had fallen victim. Every morning since she had shown up in our neighborhood, muffin would meet me on my porch. Her shrill cries were enough to send me running back into the house and back out with bowls of food. One day I had had enough, I rushed out the door and patted her on the head and said 'Not today Muffin I'm going be late'. As I pulled out the driveway I tried not to look at her but she glared at me. I pulled into the street and turned in the first u-turn to make my way to the bridge. Glancing back at the house, I couldn't believe it. Muffin had never left my porch. Her eyes followed my car as it moved down the street. The farther I got away the more pitiful looking she got. At that moment the guilt swept over. Before I could even really think about it I was u-turning again, jumping out of my car, running into the house and throwing food into Muffin's bowl. Everything I had in my arms (my lunch, my purse, my keys) fell all over the place. You know what she did? She took a sniff at it, realized it was a new kind of cat food and trotted back down the porch steps. And me? well I was late.

That's muffin. No matter how much she aggravates, no matter that she harasses your dogs, no matter that she almost peed on your neighbor's kid because she doesn't doesn't care where she goes, you love her because she is after all the neighborhood cat and I guess that means she ours.