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It’s hard to imagine my life without my little secretary, my little dominatrix, my little double-Scorpio calico, Narnia, who just turned 18 this Halloween—and developed a fatal condition involving severe anemia. I had to let her go. Fierce from the start, she came into my life in an odd and unexpected way: in December 2005, my then-hairdresser told me her cat had a litter of kittens on Halloween, 2005. Her conservative Christian family believed the kittens must have been demonic—and this little white calico with a black eye mask—the most threatening of the litter, to them, so I raced over in my 1986 Volvo, with a carrier, and rescued the white puffball the size of a tennis ball out of a shoe box in their garage near MDI, Maine. That was New Year’s Eve, 2005, and I named her Narnia—because she was almost all white except for a few caramel & black markings like a character out of CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. We lived on MDI until the next fall when we moved to southern Maine. Eventually, I bought my house at Nixie’s Vale in 2009, and she reined over the yard and woods as Queen Narnia. She certainly had a feisty, mischievous and magical personality!

In fact, it was Narnia’s first forays into the woods of Raymond that inspired me to name our new home “Nixie’s Vale.” As we explored the ferns and moss, and she crept along the stone wall, it felt like a magical wood, right out of Chronicles of Narnia or Tennyson. 🌿

Over the years, Narnia inspired poems, beheaded small rodents, climbed trees and haunted the woodpile. She surveyed our yard at Nixie’s Vale, 2009-2022, and monitored the various chipmunk holes. On sunny afternoons, she liked to roll in the dirt driveway and sprawl in sunshine across the hood of my car or in a sunny patch of grass by the lilac tree. Inside, or on the deck, Narnia never strayed far from my desk while I worked, wrote, studied and read. Sometimes she edited my papers by sprawling on top of them and crumpling the edges, smudging ink. Usually she kept me company sitting on my lap while I read or typed on my laptop, especially in winter-time as I wrote by the woodstove. In the summer, she liked to hang out on the deck under my chair in the shade, or in the shade of the big beautiful maple tree, which she occasionally climbed, just to prove she could. Of course, sometimes this got pretty dramatic. I never called the fire department to come rescue her because she always figured out how to get down on her own.


Maybe it had something to do with her Halloween birth, or double-Scorpio purrsonality~~ but she preferred when we read Gothic novels, or thrillers. She kept me safe when we watched ghost stories and old Hitchcock films on TV. (We loved “Haunting of Hill House” and reading Shirley Jackson stories!) If a mouse dared enter the house, Narnia and Sophie-Bea, my late dachshund-pointer, hunted the foolish vermin. Narnia had a funny habit of dropping dead mice on my bed, pillow or beside my bed—out of some kind of dark show of affection, she assured me! She’d purrrrr in my ear and chatter about her fresh kill and look, there it was on my pillow! How nice! 😖😬🙈😕

In 2019, she helped me plan my first trip to Ireland. She curled up with me as I read Sharon Blackie’s book, If Women Rose Rooted, and travel guides—and then sprawled across the map of Ireland in an arc pointing to West Cork. She knew me well.

Narnia

Occasionally, she followed the red fox across the yard into the woods—but she always came back with a story, chattering and chirping about her adventures. Her longtime beau, Macho-Man, was buried there, at Nixie’s Vale, and I have to believe they find each other in the animal spirit world now. (He died at age 18 in early 2015.) Like any Scorpio, she was extraordinary and beautiful—truly striking but didn’t like to pose for the camera. No portrait really does justice to her beauty, or intelligence, or how in tune she was with me, intuitively. I will miss her unbearably.