A few days after her birthday (June 9), Pepper went into the closet in our bedroom. And, except for three brief trips, and her sneaky trips to the litterbox, she hasn't left. She spends all day and night, in the corner of the closet, under my wife's dresses.
If we go in to see her, she's happy to see us and she purrs and behaves just as she always did. She's eating more than she had been. She gets brushed and is very happy about it. But she will not leave the closet. On the occasions that she has, she spent only a few minutes out and then literally ran back to her hiding spot. She likes to be picked up, as long as we don't leave the closet.
So, she doesn't seem sick or in pain. She's just... afraid of the house.
Cats.
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Update:
Three weeks later, she's out. Over the course of a few days, she started venturing out of the closet for longer and longer stays. And now she's 100% out again. I'd like to think it was because I gently coaxed her to come hang out with me just on the other side of the closet door. But who knows. Cats.
I hope Pepper is well.
Cats know things.
They rarely divulge what they know, as you are aware.
My sister brought a black cat named Beni into my mother’s house just after we knew that my Mom was in the beginning stages of the dementia that ended her life four years later in late 2015. My sister thought perhaps a pet’s presence might be comforting to my mother. We had cats when we were kids.
There were caregivers coming into daily that fairly large house, which I grew up in, and one of my brothers lived in the house as well. Beni was a nice cat but he kept his distance and counsel to himself, spending most of his time and definitely sleeping only in the now unused rooms on the upper floor of the house. We had moved a hospital bed into the downstairs for my mother, where she lived out her days and that’s where nearly all of the human activity occurred.
You had to go find Beni if you wanted to see him. He didn’t make appointments, but it was almost like that.
This went on for about four years, and then my mother passed away while being fed by one of the caregivers.
Exactly three days before died, it was observed, Beni appeared in the room where my mother lived and hung out 24 hours a day, except for visits to the kitchen where her food was. She slept near my mother’s feet at the foot of her bed for each of my mother’s last three nights, and was observed sometimes moving towards my mother’s face while she slept and peering at her for many minutes at a time.
Once my mother died, the next day Beni moved back upstairs and resumed his solitude until we sold the house a year later or so.
Beni knew. He was like a canary in the coal mine, except he would have eaten the canary given the chance, I expect.
Actually what he was like was what you might observe in small villages in third-world countrues or on the some of the islands of Greece and Italy, where folks, usually wizened old crones, begin vigils outside the houses where a person is nearing their end.
As to what Pepper knows, I haven’t a clue.
But … June 9, 2024 or thereabouts? Considering that was the beginning of the latest worst news cycle for America since Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany and/or maybe the events leading up to the attack on Fort Sumter, including the Confederate Christian mob attacks on the U.S. Capitol in the days leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s certification as President in early 1861, maybe Pepper is laying low and biding her time.
Cats know things.
So do I, but in order to avoid being murdered by the fascist MAGA Christian Republican genocidal anti- American movement (I know who these subhumans are; we’re dealing with undisguised Evil), I’m now laying low too and, unlike my time at Obsidian Wings and then here lately, I’m not letting my cat out of the bag any longer and I’m keeping what I know is going to happen to myself.
At least until the Civil War erupts in full savage violent blood feud force and the deaf begin hearing and the blind begin seeing. Then, I won’t go quietly.
Trust no one.
Catch you all on the flip side, mt friends, I hope, when we are too old to care any longer, and good luck to cats and the real human beings remaining among us.
My god, man, it’s good to see your writing again.
Beni was a boy cat, despite the “she’s” that appear here and there.
My girl’s 12 yr old female tuxedo disappeared into her son’s room for several months, emerging for food, drink, catbox. That’s it. This happened immediately after her elderly puggle had his last ride to the vet. The weird thing is, as far as the cat was concerned, the puggle might as well have been a piece of furniture. NO interaction whatsoever. Would not have been surprised if she had walked over him as if he was a rug. (She didn’t.) Guess it was just reaction to a change in environment.
Cats have minds of their own. They are inscrutable.
If Pepper weren’t so old, I would say this sounds like a cat preparing to have a litter. Nesting in a closet is apparently typical feline behaviour at such a time, but I’m sure you know this as a long time hoster of cats – I don’t say owner for reasons obvious to anybody who has ever had a cat.