Marble

I'm feeling sad today because yesterday Marble, my little tabby cat, died.

She's had a long healthy life and would have been 20 in March, but it's still so sad to see her go, I think secretly I thought she would live forever. We got her when I was 4, a tiny wild ball of fluff (see above) born in a hole in the wall of a barn, pot luck, the one that scratched the least as the farmer reached in to grab. And she's always been pretty wild, off out every night for adventures; off catching mice, voles, black birds and rabbits, sparrows and bats, in fact nothing was safe. She sometimes left their heads on the door step (gifts or scraps for us to tidy away, we'll never know...) and I'll never forget the day I came into the kitchen to find a live but stunned mouse sat patiently on her dish cleaning it's whiskers. Saving it for later I presume.

Once she caught a giant white unidentified bird that was more than twice as big as her and after breaking it into bits to get it through the fence had a great time plucking it all over the garden. She scratched if you tickled her tummy. But I loved her for that. In the last few years she's slowed down a lot, (only catching baby rabbits...) she's been more friendly, sat on my knee, actually quite enjoyed being tickled under the chin. She slept on my bed (although I'm sure she would insist it was me that slept on hers). She spent her last day sat in the sunshine.