Was going through my hard drive, cleaning it out, and came across a few pictures of the family cats and felt the sudden desire to put a couple of them up onto the world. Warning: Many words and a few tears follow! You have been warned! Sorta.

This big cat's name was Sparks. Waaaaaay back in the day (July 1996, to be exact), my mother and stepdad took me and my brother out to what was then the annual July 4th celebration at my aunt's house, way out in the countryside. My aunt and cousins had found him by the road a week earlier, near his mother, who'd been run over, and he appeared to be the only kitten of the litter that had stuck around or survived, and they took him home to keep him safe until they could figure out what to do with him. He solved that problem for them--that July 4th, when all the adults had made their traditional circle of lawn chairs in the tractor garage driveway and sat down for lunch, the kitten made his rounds, begging each seat for scraps until he got to my mother's chair. She picked him up and didn't let him go the rest of the night.

Needless to say, he got to come home with us that night (I still say he knew we'd do that), and we'd even named him before we'd gotten a mile away from my aunt's house--Sparks, to remind us of the day when we first met him. By the time he was a year old he tended to weigh in at fourteen to sixteen pounds. My mother took this particular photo sometime in 2005, when she found him napping in the dryer, which was one of his favorite spots to sleep thanks to the warm, freshly dried clothes he could find inside.

Unfortunately, he grew really sick last year and quickly reached the point where he had to make an effort to breathe and didn't walk more than ten feet at a time before he stopped to rest. On July 29th, about three weeks after his twelfth birthday, we had to make the incredibly difficult choice to have him put to sleep when the vet told us that the x-rays had revealed inoperable tumors in his chest. I only stayed long enough to see that the sedative was kicking in before I left for home, as I really didn't want his exact moment of death to be the last time I saw him, and I still miss that big, furry rug. I did manage to take him out for one last stroll through our backyard that morning, which was his absolute favorite place to be when he was younger and more energetic.