Tribute to Puffy

Puffy Grant

Spring 1986 to April 17, 2006

This afternoon, my family put my cherished Puffy cat to sleep. She was nineteen years old, as near as we can figure. She had some health issues and she had severe problems with normal walking. Her senses of smell, hearing and sight had all faded and she was having difficulty with normal daily activities. My family knew that her time was coming soon and today was the day. She is now buried in our backyard.

We got Puffy and her sibling PawPaws when I was in grade four back in Jordan Station, Ontario. A friend from my school lived on a farm and had a litter of kittens to give away. We gave Puffy her name for the obvious reason. We named her brother PawPaws because he had eight claws on each of his front paws. PawPaws died after only four or five years due to some health issues. Puffy had been a hardy soul, surviving numerous moves and new locations and plenty of pet dogs invading her territory. She has been smart and cautious enough to remain with us these many years. The picture below shows me and my brother with the sibling kittens.

Puffy and I had developed a nice ritual in recent times. Every day when I came home from work, I would turn on the light in my bedroom, just around the corner from her favourite spot by the space heater. She would rouse herself from her constant slumber and walk into my bedroom after me, jumping onto my bed. I would then feed her a couple of kitty treats, as she well expected me to do.

I remember teaching her how to open closed doors in the house in Jordan Station when she was still a kitten. I showed her how to claw at the bottom or side of a door to pull it open, or press against a door to push it open. It only took me a couple of minutes when we were both quite young but she never forgot how to do that from then on.

Back in Peterborough, the first city we moved to after Jordan, I had an aquarium full of small lizards. Chameleons and geckos, that kind of thing. Puffy was always trying to figure out a way to get in at those tasty little creatures through the cage on top. One day, I returned from church and I was walking into my bedroom when I noticed that the sliding door on the cage was moved. I immediately figured that the lizards had escaped so I raced into my bedroom and...SQUISH! I jumped several feet into the air and landed on my bed. I put the details together afterwards and I discovered that Puffy had managed to get on top of my dresser, had opened the cage and had eaten most of the lizards. She had apparently toyed with the last of the lizards on the floor and that's what I had stumbled upon accidentally. Ah, good times.

Puffy was great during our years in Wawa. She would chase down some cute bird or catch a small mice and she would leave it on our front porch for us in the morning. If that isn't devotion, I don't know what is. She lived through a series of large and small dogs. In some cases she was bigger than our dogs (like Mitzy) and in other cases she was dwarfed by our springer spaniels or black labrador dogs. In any case, she always made sure that they knew who was in charge of our house. Nothing like a claw in your muzzle to figure out who's the boss.

When my parents and my siblings were all living in other places or countries several years ago, I kept Puffy as our only pet. Fortunately, she never required much caretaking. You could leave her with food and water for a week and she would be fine. I've had a lot of fun with our little kitty and I have many fond memories that I will hold onto forever.

Et bonjour, ma chere Puffy! Merci pour tout!