Portulacca

Portulacca was born on the highest shelf of the garden shop patio at the discount department store where I worked after college.  As far as any of us who worked in the garden shop knew, her mother was a solid black feral cat. Since Portulacca’s mother was missing about a third of her tail and the top of one ear, we could not be sure that at one time she sported other colors on those body parts she had lost, but most certainly, the year that Portu was born, all that remained was solid black.  

 That year’s litter was discovered by the garden shop manager when he was sorting through boxes of stock stored on the high shelf on the left side of the shop.  The next day when the rest of us climbed the ladder to take a peek, there were no kittens for us to admire. It was later in the week that we discovered them on the highest shelf on the right side of the garden shop.  Because the shelves were not contiguous, we concluded that the mother cat had most likely carried the kittens along a strip of metal that was suspended from the ceiling.  The walking surface of the metal was about an inch and a half wide with an inch turned down on each side.  The upside down channel ran the length of the garden shop and was suspended at least 18 inches from the front edge of both sets of shelves.  The mother cat would have had to leap this distance twice, kitten dangling from mouth, to get onto this catwalk and back off again at her destination. That meant that she made the jump six times in all, two times three kittens. After that, we were careful not to pay the kittens too much attention lest we put the mother cat through a similar trial again.

 Soon enough, two of the kittens were out and about and plenty curious about us.  The store manager was not keen on anyone feeding them, but some one did. They grew pretty fast.  One evening, the manager of the garden shop, motivated by his fear of the store manager, as well as his fear the kittens would be run over by the forklift, climbed the ladder to extract the young cats from their top shelf home.  They scattered. With the help of several spotters, he was finally able to corner them underneath the very bottom shelf.  He grabbed one and then two, but the third kitten, smaller and harder to see, evaded him.  The employee who had volunteered to adopt the kittens had to get home to her human offspring. She left with the kittens that had been captured so far. Only the garden shop manager and I remained. The store had closed.  The lights were off and the patio was growing dark.  Once more the garden shop manager dragged himself into the dust and dirt under the bottom shelf. He made contact, but the kitten struggled free. He pulled out to regroup.  “I had its leg,”  he said as he sucked on his finger. I tossed him a pair of gloves.  He went under again.  He was concerned that he had injured the kitten, “I think it’s limping,” he told me. I knelt down to look.  The kitten jumped and the manager grabbed.  Portulacca was captured.   

 She was half the size of the other kittens, the runt, a tortoiseshell---so difficult to see in shadow---and as I later came to know, every bit as wiley as her mother.  She rode home with me because, as I told my mother, “he pulled her by the leg, she was limping---I’ll take her to the woman who took the other kittens tomorrow, when I know that she is all right.”  Twenty-two years later my father snapped a picture of Portulacca, basking in the sun on the brick sidewalk behind my parents’ house.

The summer that I brought Portulacca to live at my parents’ house I needed something to keep myself from going insane while I tried to figure out what to do after graduating from college,  so I began to dig. My parents’ front yard was hot, mostly sunny and full of hard white clay, the kind Native Americans might have fired to create storage containers that would last thousands of years. I chose a spot that was several feet from the front walk and to the side of the front stoop. My plan was to build a stone wall where I cut into the slope.  Some large pines and a live oak tree would block part of the hot sun below the wall.  I wanted to move some of the wildflowers that my father collected into the spots of shade, plant some azaleas.  I wanted to transform the mediocre lawn, to bring some of the wild shaded beauty that was hidden in the back yard to the front. In the sunny spot next to the wall I wanted to plant a cutting garden full of zinnias and cosmos, with big, bright, extroverted blossoms. To this end I would come home from work and begin to work again, I shoveled away the fill dirt that my father had had the contractors smooth over the top of the clay to make the front yard a large uniformly sloping hill. When I reached the clay, I hacked it with a spade.  As my project progressed, I began to collect and stack the stones that were to line the deep cut I had created. I liked to fit together their irregular shapes, to lift and place them. Mute and solid, the rocks comforted me. They gave me a break from the anxious stream of thoughts about my future that were running circles inside my head.  The tautness of my muscles, the smell of damp dirt, the sound of the spade slicing through the heavy clay and the silent heft of the rocks, only these things could fill my mind so that the perpetual torrent of thoughts about my stalled life found no space there. 

Late in the night that I brought Portulacca home, I placed her on my lap. That evening I had been unable to get her to eat solid food so I had watered down cow’s milk and let her suck it from a rag. It didn’t occur to me to buy kitten formula from a veterinarian.  I had no idea it existed. Luckily, the cow’s milk did not give her diarrhea as it does for many cats.   At that point, Portulacca was about the size of my hand, wary and exhausted from the chase at the garden shop.   I shifted a little in my chair.  She sat straight up and looked at me.  She opened her mouth in a huge, gaping, fearless and ferocious hiss. Immediately she collapsed into a deep, deep sleep.  This tiny kitten was no mute rock.

It was from my excavation project that Portulacca scored her name.  The swathe of earth that lay between the bricks of my parents’ front walk and the rim of the cavern I had dug was a part of the very top of the hill my parents’ house rested upon. It had never been topped with other dirt and was not shaded. Nothing wanted to grow there.  A few tufts of fescue struggled in the baking clay. At the garden shop I found the perfect resident for this barren strip.  The small plant had succulent leaves and a reputation for thriving in poor, dry soil. Better yet, most of the garden shop customers tended to overlook this little plant and its virtues.  They bought roses and dahlias --- plants that guzzled water and survived with the help of systemic pesticides.  Consequently, the plant that was the solution to my landscaping dilemma was marked down by the trayful, and I received my employee discount on top of that.  So day after day I brought home mixed-color six-packs and transplanted them. They baked and bloomed.  The clay swathe was barren no more. The morning after I brought home the kitten, it was my mother who transferred the name of the tiny plant that came from the garden shop to the tiny cat that came from the same place.  Unlike her jet black mother, the kitten’s fur grew in small bunches of many colors, like the flowers in the trays that I brought home; and born in an environment made of steel, cement and plywood, surrounded by asphalt parking lot, the tiny runt had survived, just as the overlooked plants were now surviving in the baking clay. My mother’s transplant took root. Portulacca had a name now,  the first small attachment that would secure her hold upon my parents.  

Always in motion, Portulacca was not a lap cat. My mother was amazed when the palm-sized baby who would not eat solid food squatted in an aluminum pie plate full of litter, “She knew exactly what it was for!” It couldn't have taken more than 36 hours for Portulacca to figure out solid food.  She ate dry kibble and the wet food that we fed her, but she went wild over the corn that my father shaved off his cob at dinnertime.  She also had a taste for cantaloupe.  We laughed as she tugged at rinds that were bigger than she was. My father rolled up a newspaper and challenged her with it.  She pounced with great ferocity and shredded it to bits. Occasionally, my parents made noise about my taking Portulacca to the employee that had adopted her littermates.  I waited.  Then, unwittingly, as she stooped to pat the silly kitten, my mother acknowledged that Portulacca belonged.  

 When I was four or five the manufacturers of the hairspray that my mother used attached a free gift to the aerosol can and promoted it on TV.  The gift was a combination brush and comb with a pointed handle for lifting the hairspray-drenched sections of currently popular coiffures. For some reason, when I saw the commercials, I latched onto the offer. Every time my mother bought hairspray, I searched among the cans on the shelf for one that was ensconced in cellophane with its gift--like on TV.  When my father came home after shopping from a list that I knew included hairspray, he shook his head. “Did you look at all the cans?” I asked.  “Yes I did, “ he replied.  Time after time I was disappointed, until one day, there on the drugstore shelf, I spotted my free brush-comb.  “We found it!”  my mother announced when we returned home.  My dad congratulated us.

 My mother tells me that after I acquired my prize, we visited her sister’s home. This sister had three little girls, and an infant son. My mother says that when she and I walked into the living room of her sister's house, the floor was covered in toys. She knelt beside me and said, “Oh, Julie, look at all the toys.”  There were nowhere near that many toys at our house.  My mother was worried I would feel bad because we didn't have so much.  Instead, she recounts that I looked at her and replied, “They don't have a free brush-comb.”  I don't remember the trip to my aunt's house, or any of the toys that were there, but I played with my free brush-comb until the pointed handle broke off and I have often wondered what became of it.

 Grown and graduated from college, I sat in my parents' den, as my mother, in her nightgown, bent over to pat the multi-colored kitten.  “Portulacca,” my mother said to her, “Portulacca---you little free brush-comb.” Portulacca could receive no higher compliment, nor was she ever going to see her littermates again.

 When I finally left my parents’ home to pursue a masters degree I could not take a cat to the dorm with me, so Portulacca stayed with my parents. At least this was the story we told, and for about the next 5 years, my mother continued to call Portulacca “Julie’s cat.”  However, the day I left, my father stood a few feet from my car. “You’re forgetting something,” he said and he pointed to Portulacca who was leaning against his leg. Before I could say anything my mother jumped in, “Oh, you know he’s lying.  You can’t take that cat away from him.” By the time I graduated with my second degree, Portulacca would not even go out into the yard unless my dad went with her. When he opened the door and she stuck her head out, if he did not step out as well, she pulled her head back inside. A two-by-four spanned the distance from the fig bush to the edge of the roof for her convenience. “She likes to chase squirrels,” my father explained. He showed me a photo of Portulacca and a squirrel in a face-off on the peak of the roof.  Then he pointed to a disembodied squirrel’s tail lying by the back door, “She brought that to us the other day,” We walked around the yard to look at his collection of native plants, an interest he and I shared.  When we neared his tool shed, he put his hands on his knees. Portulacca jumped on his back and then up onto the roof of the shed.  As we continued looking at plants, he ran through the inventory of things she had brought to the back door: the usual small mammals and a bird or two,  a couple of snakes, the squirrel’s tail, and crayfish she’d pulled from the creek.  He was particularly proud of the crayfish.  It had taken a lot of ingenuity to nab those without getting pinched. 

Scattered all over the yard, everywhere there was a stone wall to sit on, a step or a bench, there was also a comb, the human kind, or a pet brush, something with bristles, indicating wherever my dad chose to rest, Portulacca would join him.  Their favorite spot was the large stone bench outside the back door.  My father had harvested a giant stone step from the demolition of a judge’s home in the older part of town and set it on smaller granite steps from other demolitions to make the bench. From the kitchen window my mother and I watched as my dad held the comb still while Portulacca walked back and forth underneath it. He scratched her chin with the comb’s teeth and smoothed her head with his hand.  They both sat and watched the birds.

Indoors, Portulacca all but owned a chair in my parents’s den.  Even when Portulacca wasn’t in the room, my mother’s friends avoided sitting there when they visited.  The hanging basket at the den window was smushed down in the middle, another spot where Portulacca frequently napped. Under the basket, only plants remained in my mother’s fish tank.  My parents thought Portulacca had been drinking water from the tank when she balanced on its thin rim.  In reality, she’d been lapping up guppies.  Wiley as she was, Portulacca kept an eye on my father’s favorite chair.  When he vacated it, she would immediately claim it as her own, after all, he had pre-warmed it  for her, hadn’t he?  One day after trying on some new shoes, he set the shoebox on the chair cushion to block her takeover while he stepped out of the room.  He returned to find Portulacca asleep in the shoebox—on his chair.  

When my father sat down with a cup of coffee, Portulacca jumped into his lap and he set his warm mug on her forehead, dragging it backward over her head and onto her neck.  Between sips he would roll the mug on her cheeks, along her sides.  When he vacuumed, she followed the vacuum attachment as it went back and forth on the rug until he vacuumed her. When either of my parents swept the kitchen, Portulacca followed the broom, crying to be brushed with its straws.  When my father raked leaves.  He also raked Portulacca. 

As my parent’s aged from their 60s into their 80s, their hearing began to decline. When Portulacca stayed in the yard longer than my father did, it was her custom to tap on a window to signal she wanted inside.  As my parents’ hearing grew worse, Portulacca’s tapping became louder and louder.   Anyone with decent hearing who wasn’t familiar with the tapping ritual was in for a scare. The loud WAP sounded as if someone was trying to break the window.  About half the time, she accompanied the WAP with a loud, short YOW! Her vocalization didn’t sound like a cat or anything familiar.  So, not only did it seem someone was trying to break in—one might conclude the intruder was extraterrestrial.

With all the time and attention my parents gave this 9-pound cat, you might think they allowed her to tear up the furniture, but I don’t recall her scratching anything in their home—but me—when I played too roughly with her.  Neither did I, as a child—I did not intentionally tear up the home my parents provided. It occurs to me that Portulacca probably received a balance of discipline and enrichment similar to the one I received when I was growing up, but with a rather large dolop of indulgence on top, indulgence I enjoyed observing as much as Portulacca enjoyed receiving it—and my parents enjoyed handing it over. As far as I know, this process of sharing and receiving between a beloved pet and its humans has never been mapped, but it would look something like the water cycle, with arrows that designate the path of warmth and joy constantly circulating so that all included both give and receive these valuable commodities.  The difference being that the precious natures of warmth and joy are not derived from scarcity, but because warmth and joy tend to inspire more of the same. I have read and heard many reasons for bringing a pet into a home.  What I saw develop between my parents and Portulacca is the only one that holds credence with me. 

Portulacca’s age did not show until her very last year, her 22nd.  She began to walk on her feet instead of her toes.  She had difficulty sweeping the litter in her box.  When I visited, I removed large knots of fur from her coat.  Happily she groomed, as if my helping her out inspired her to do what she could. She began to limp and we discovered she had a rapidly spreading bone cancer.  Yet, every day, including her last, she went to the door and waited for my father to go outside with her.