Farm Story: Just Call me Elmira

I was a cat's worst nightmare. I chased 'em, I hugged 'em, I dressed em up in dollclothes and I strolled the poor little fetchers around the farm in my doll stroller. I loved cats.

You remember Elmira on the cartoon Animaniacs? Elmira is me. Luckily on the farm I had an unlimited number of kittens and cats to entertain myself. My mom would step out the door and call "Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!" and they would run from all directions to see what she had to scrape into the big old frypan that was their smorgasboard buffet table. Usually within seconds of her feeding them you could no longer see the big frying pan because of the number of kitties squeezing in to get their share. What mom offered them twice a day in leftovers was merely their dessert however, because we saw the cats quite often with mice and birds in their mouths. There were little rodents in abundance in the barns and granaries, and they helped keep the population down.

I used to love love love it when a 'chubby' cat would show up suddenly with a svelte, slim figure because I knew that there was a new litter of kittens hidden somewhere in the haystack or strawstack. The cats always hid their kittens (most likely because of the resident kitten-annoyer) (me!) However I became very adept at finding the litters of kittens. I would nonchalantly hang around watching mama cat as she ate the food from the frying pan, and as she headed back to her kittens I would duck and dart between trees as I followed her back to her babies. Most often she would elude me at the very last moment but I knew the approximate area that she would disappear into the crevices between bales of hay. I would quietly listen until I heard the tiny meows and--aha! I would find a batch of tiny, sweet little kittens. I loved them. They smelled clean and sweet, their tiny little paws were a delicate pink, and they had nearly no claws at first. It was a wondrous event, checking in on those sweet little newborns each day and watching them as their eyes unsealed and revealed those pretty little cat-eyes, and as they learned to walk and pounce and play. At about 5 or 6 weeks, mama cat would grab them each by the scruff of the neck and bring them into the yard to introduce them to the outside farm life.

Little did they know that now they were at the mercy of "Elmira", who had an endless supply of doll clothes and time to stroll them around the farm!