I adopted Sparky and his now-departed brother Woody in the spring of 2006. I was down to just Beatrice at home and thinking of enlarging the family, so I stopped by my vet’s before heading to Oakland to see Melissa one Friday and there the boys were. They were utterly devoted to one another and couldn’t be separated.
You can imagine the phone call to Melissa: “I’m on my way, but I stopped and met two kittens, and I think their names are Sparky and Woody, and the vet says I can take them for the weekend to see how we get along, but I don’t have to adopt them if we decide I shouldn’t—you don’t mind if I bring them with me, do you?”
Generous-hearted Melissa said I should, of course, bring them, knowing that there never really had been any other option and that it didn’t matter if adoption wasn’t mandatory, there’d be no going back on these boys. (The fact that I decided on the drive to Oakland that their last name was “Keeper” might have been a clue.)
Sparky and Woody raised kittenly havoc that weekend, breaking several plant-pots and a set of salt-and-pepper shakers and using a large, large split-leaf rhododendrom as a trampoline until it was nearly flattened. As you might imagine, Archy, Maggie, and Damian were rather overwhelmed.
Here’s Melissa’s rendering of the scene.
(If you want to see more of her artwork, you can click here, here, and here.)
Funny, funny cartoon! And a great story, too. I can’t imagine being just a foster mother to kittens; I’d never be able to let them go. So I get it that you couldn’t actually ‘just try’ having Sparky and Woody in your family.