That's the two-line obituary, but two lines definitely couldn't sum up the life of such a wonderful pet. I first met Bubbles about seven and a half years ago, when Kathy and I started dating. Kathy had her since she was a kitten. Bubbles was a beautiful, medium-long haired Maine Coon. She had soft, silky fur that would change color in the sunlight depending on how the light would shine through it. She had big, expressive eyes, a white blaze on her face that connected to her white chest and belly, and white socks on her big paws.
She was inquisitive and talkative, and definitely a lot more vocal than other cats. If you talked to her, quite often she would talk back, possibly even carrying on a conversation with you (she liked to get in the last word.) She could read peoples' moods, and quite often would curl up with Kathy when she was feeling sad or depressed. She would go tearing around the house like she was possessed when she had a case of the "kitty crazies", and even at her advanced age she could easily jump half the height of a door frame to swat at the "no-see-ums". She liked being petted, but only on her terms - she wasn't a lap cat, and heaven help your hand if you tried to pet her without her being ok with it.
She liked to sneak downstairs to the basement to try and steal her sister's food, even though she had a perfectly good bowl of her own upstairs. She also liked to swipe bites of "people food". Whenever we would crack open a can of mushrooms or olives, she was right there begging for a piece. She could hear the wrapper on a slice of cheese being opened from across the house, and would come squirrel up for a small nibble of it that I would break off the corner. She was a fiend for raw spinach, but you had to tear it into bite-size bits for her, otherwise she wouldn't touch it. If you sat down on the couch with an ice cream treat of some sort, you had to keep an eye on it - otherwise, she'd be right there, trying to get her own licks in. There were times, based on her proclivity for non-cat-food items, that we wondered if she wasn't a person, reincarnated as a cat.
She loved to lay around in sunbeams, or perch on the back of an armchair we had by the window so she could watch the world outside. In the spring and fall when we would have the windows open, she would spend hours sitting in the window sill watching everything and taking in any "new sniffs" she could. She loved the outside - Kathy has told me about many times when she lived in an apartment with a small patio, how the cats would happily spend all day out there if you let them. She was afraid of thunderstorms, and when one would roll through she would typically curl up by either my or Kathy's feet until the weather had passed, but otherwise she was a fearless force to be reckoned with, that would gladly attack your feet that were under the blanket in bed or chase that elusive red dot (from the laser pointer) with abandon.
I can still remember when I realized that Bubbles had accepted me as "her people". I don't recall the exact date, but I remember what happened. When Kathy and I would lay down to totally zonk out for the night, Bubbles would usually jump up onto the bed and pester us for a bit before she settled down at the foot of the bed. She would come up and walk on top of both of us, and usually bunt her head into both of us, wanting attention. She would usually get a few pets on the head, and then go away, but one night she decided to crawl up my chest (I was reclining, not fully flopped down to try and go to sleep yet), turned around so her butt was toward my face (and her tail could readily smack me upside my head), settled in and hunkered down, and started purring. At that point I knew she felt safe around me and she trusted me.
I'm going to miss that insistent little fuzzball.
