30 May 1985 - 11 April 2003

As of 11 April 2003, Snowy is no longer with us. She crossed the Rainbow Bridge and Izzy is the senior member. Snowy lived for almost 18 years. Like Angel, I had to make a very hard decision but it's one that responsible parents of furbabies have to make at some point. Snowy had reached the point where severe arthritis, a thyroid condition causing massive weight loss and then not being able to keep herself clean made it inevitable. Cats are fastidious creatures and the last was the final straw. Snowy trusted me to do what was best for her all her life and I had to fulfill that trust. And in return, she gave me unconditional love and companionship even if she didn't always show it.

But let me start at the beginning. I was living in Macon, GA working at a fast food place as a manager. One day while shopping for cat food, etc...I happen to strike up a conversation with another lady in the same aisle. Her mama cat had had kittens about a month before and she was starting to think of how to get them into new homes...then she told me about the kittens.

The mama cat was an all-white cat with one green and one blue eye but half her babies had two blue eyes and were deaf as a result. Knowing that those kittens would be helpless in an outside world, she wanted homes that were dedicated to inside only. I decided I wanted to look and see if one took to me.

Well, one did and a week later when she was 5 weeks old, I took Snowy into my home and my life. I had to keep her with me as much as I could the first week or so cause of Angel and Smokey. Angel had been thru this routine before with Smokey but Smokey hadn't. It didn't take long for Smokey to decide that Snowy was HER baby and acted accordingly.

The next years rolled on without too many incidences. I moved from Macon to Atlanta and then back to my mother's in Greenville where I stayed until I bought my condo about 4 years later in 1991. The picture above is the earliest one of Snowy I can find and it was taken at my mother's. And the one to the left was taken about the same time. It was taken while she was stretching and it's hard to tell which way is up.

There was a point in time when Snowy could jump up on a 6 foot wardrobe almost straight. It wasn?t until after Smokey died that she started aging and discovered that she couldn?t jump so high anymore. Izzy was able to help keep her young at heart for a few more years but about the time Maggie joined the household it was getting obvious that Snowy was getting up there and I didn?t have many years left with her. And then she took on the role of "grandmother". That kept her young feeling for a bit longer. Until the first part of April.

Snowy was an American Shorthair who happened to be an albino. Her eyes were barely blue, mostly washed out looking with little control of her irises. Her eyes tended to reflect red in pictures, very easily.

Snowy had a bad habit of getting lost...since she depended on her sight to find us, she could be in the same room with you and if she happened to be turned around, she would yell...and THAT was the only way to describe her meow. She had even gotten lost in a bathroom that you occupied just a bit before! She just forgot to follow you out.

One of my best memories with Snowy was just before Charles and I got married. He took all three cats back home with him to CA since we were not flying straight home after the wedding. The next morning after they get home, he calls me at 6AM (3 AM his time) and informs me that MY cat woke him up demanding breakfast. It wasn't until we moved back to the east coast that we got them switched to eating at dinner time and not at breakfast. Now this was part of a can of wet cat food divided between three of them...it was just a treat. I always had water and dry food available all the time.

Okay...now to her recent photos:

The one on the left is on of the places Snowy found safest from a Kamikaze attack by Izzy, who found out very early that Snowy could not hear her sneaking up on her. Izzy just wanted to play but there were lots of times when Snowy was feeling her age and just wanted to be left alone.







The one on the right is one of my favorites and is dubbed *Praying Snowy* cause she looks like she is in prayer...maybe asking the Big Cat in the Sky to get rid of Izzy? What happened was that she got so totally asleep that she didn't *hear* us come home...I managed to grab the camera and shot it before she *heard* us.







Just one more photo on this page. I've got a few more of her with the *children*. But this one I call Comfortable Snowy and *I* want to come back as MY cat. What a life.









In June of 2002, we had a stray wander onto our deck and into our hearts. Naturally, Snowy was NOT a happy camper. She looked at me like, "WHY are you doing this to ME??" Well we named the stray, Maggie, who blessed us with 3 kittens. I'll tell their story along with Maggie's on another page, but I need to explain the rest of Snowy's life. When the *children* were old enough to come out and join the family and start exploring, they introduced themselves to Snowy and we waited with bated breath. We did not know how this was going to work. But she ended up being a good grandmother. As long as they didn't come up to her from her back end, which hurt from arthritis, she was fine. It was amazing to watch her treat those babies as her grandchildren. And after we came back from the vet without her, they knew something was wrong. They were impossible the rest of the weekend. Did not behave at all. I think they were protesting in their own way. And I don't blame them, I protested too.



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