That’s the day mom and i found winnie on the lake road. we were riding our bikes and suddenly heard a loud MEW from the side of the road, and stopped to see a tiny little grey kitten. somebody must have dumped him! people can be rotten.

We decided that mom would bike home and get the van, and i’d stay there with the kitty. we got him safely home and that’s about the extent of that memory. I decided to call him Winston Chedister III. I called him Winston because Jim suggested it, after Winston Churchill. I picked Chedister because dad had a tenant named chedister and it amused me, and I added “the third” because it just seemed right. But we always called him Winnie.

yesterday afternoon i combed through a few shoe boxes and small tubs of photos, the pictures crammed into the containers in such an incredibly random way – will i ever get them sorted out? somewhat doubtful. extremely doubtful. not likely.

but after much searching i finally found photos that i actually have a memory of taking – winnie as a tiny kitten down at the lake.

and just now i searched through my journal from 2002, where i’d jotted down many random and worthless things. i did, however, find the entry on September 29th, “found kitten.” that’s the entirety of what i wrote, but at it was great to see it. in the journals i keep track of massages i give plus random things i do – so many people who aren’t in my life anymore, so many things so long ago…but all that matters right now is that one entry.

i quickly called mom, who keeps much better track of things, and she read me her entry from that day – it was something like “grace and i found a sweet little kitten on the lake road when we were taking a bike ride.”

side note – i’m slightly appalled at how rotten my penmanship has gotten since 2002. i can still clearly read everything i wrote back then. today, i’m lucky if i can decipher something i just scrawled out.

i’m going to say it’s because i mostly use the keyboard for all the writing i do now – it’s not that much, but i almost never write anything in longhand. Almost completely illegible even to me. maybe i should practice my penmanship…

anyway, like i said, i remember being nervous about taking the tiny kitten down to the lake, but i know he had a great time. so tiny and cute!

i have no idea of the date of these photos, but i’m guessing it was not that long after we found him. so early october.

Winnie climbed up a peach tree. he outlived the tree.

Winnie always loved being outside, and never strayed far, not like crazy lester who always wants to head for the hills, or at least for the neighbor’s house three houses down. Winnie was a homebody, but loved lying on the front porch.

this photo was developed on the same date as the above photos; maybe i took this before the ones up there? he looks even smaller here to me.

at first i was confused by this photo, but luckily it had the same date stamp on the back as the ones above. at first i thought it was Winnie with Honey, but then i realized this was mom and dad’s cat GK sprawled out on the ottoman, with tiny little winnie playing down below.

i don’t know when this was taken, but clearly Winnie was very proud of his catch. the trees look bare, so this must have been sometime during his first winter.

these are the first photos of winnie and honey, sometime in 2003.

I scanned all those photos and they mostly don’t look nearly as good as the originals. but i’m so happy i found them…i think i’ll frame some.

whew.

ok then,

g.