choplicker

When I turned twenty I got a cat, Annabelle, and her daughter Henrietta. Annabelle promptly got preggo and had kittens, all but two of which I kept. For a while there, I had a lot of cats.

For the past several years, though, I just had one, Choplicker, the oldest and strongest of Annabelle’s second (and last) litter. He died last night. He was fifteen.

Here he is a week old:

I named him Choplicker because when he was this size, he used to wake me up by climbing up onto my chest and licking my face. It got shortened to Chopper, and Choppo, and Chops. The kitty in the picture behind Chopper is Goober. The two of them used to romp the house, chasing each other up and down the stairs like squirrels.

Chopper was a Mighty Hunter, bringing us rats, mice, moles, and frogs (his special favorite). He was a loner after Goober died, and hated to be picked up, but if I was sitting, reading, he would come curl up in my lap and purr. He loved to eat–swelled up like a basketball stealing his Mama’s food for a while (luckily he trimmed back down to his hunter physique after Annabelle and her fancy food were gone). He would sleep on the bed at night, a heavy log taking up all the space and making it impossible for the lowly humans to roll over. When he drank water, he would spread his legs far apart and splash his paw in. He often splashed water right out of the toilet into puddles on the floor, like he was trying to catch a fish. Maybe this is how he caught the frogs.

He was very sick all this past week, and didn’t eat or drink the last few days. I’m glad he went on–he was feeling pretty bad the last day, and I hated for him to suffer.  I miss him terribly, especially as he was the last of the cats.

Here is how I will remember him:

Bye, Choppo. We love you.