Miss Pity Paws

In the midst of difficult times, it's good to look for the little blessings...the little things that help you keep a good attitude.

About 3 1/2 weeks after Katrina hit, I got back to my home in Mid City New Orleans. I wasn't really supposed to be there; only residents of Uptown, the French Quarter and the Garden District were allowed back in, with proof of residency and ID. But I came in with two friends, one of whom lived uptown. His home was okay. So I drove from Uptown to Mid City and didn't encounter anyone trying to stop me.

I'll talk about that drive and my home another time ... this is about the little blessing. It's just a simple little story that may not be all that interesting to the reader. But the point of the story is how it made me feel.

By the time I got to my house, my friends and I were feeling pretty melancholy. There were almost no other people on the roads other than the occasional National Guard. The neighborhood I lived in was eerily silent. You don't realize how many sounds a bustling city has in it till they're gone. Everything was like a ghost town.

In a city known for it's lush vegetation and flora, there was barely anything green. Everything was dead and brown. I was in my back yard looking at the piles of debris and dead plant material when I heard a frantic little mewing. In the yard next door, there was a little kitten. She was nervous about us of course, but I was able to risk life and limb and climb over the fence (okay, I pretty much just stepped over it), and she let me pick her up fairly easily. Actually, by the time she overcame her nervousness, she almost climbed right up me.

I fell in love right away. She knew what she was doing...being flirtatious and combining just the right amount of vulnerability with aggressive independence. She completely won me over. I had some cat food with me because I was feeding cats for some friends, and she ate a huge bowl of food. She was obviously ravenous.

But she didn't want to TOUCH the water. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her. She was just a little kitten; she'd probably only been a couple of weeks old when the floods came. My neighborhood was under 3 - 4 feet of water and she fended for herself somehow that whole time. The waters had only been subsided for a week or so when I found her.

Of course I took her home, though I knew I couldn't keep her at my mom's. A WONDERFUL friend agreed to adopt her, and named her "Miss Pity Paws."

Little MPP was fiercely independent, and I guess independently fierce too. She ate part of another cat (evidently she chewed part of the tail off), and generally wreaked havoc on my friend's house and other cats. But my wonderful friend didn't really tell me about all that till later ... she is sticking it out and is in love with Miss Pity Paws too.

As I was driving back home with this little kitten, I realized the blessing. In the midst of all this loss and sadness, this little kitten managed to stay alive. It's almost like she was an offering to me ... a life in the midst of all the death and destruction. She helped me leave New Orleans that day with something other than sadness.