Sunny showed up here as a half grown kitten. I have no idea if he was dumped by someone or wandered in from a neighbor’s place. Our neighbors aren’t that close so I think that is unlikely. We kept him as an inside-only cat for a few reasons. One is that the house is near to the main road. It’s not busy, but traffic is fast. We find lots of dead animals on the road. Also, my experience with barn cats in the past is that they are always full of fleas and I don’t want to deal with that. It also didn’t help that we had from three to five dogs here at the time and one of them was not to be trusted with a small animal that ran.

So Sunny lived in the house and helped with lots of projects—like working on handwoven blankets to finish the fringe.

Helping with packing boxes to ship.

He supervised painting my office…

…and doing paperwork.

He did his share of cuddling.

He was a support kitty after a late night and early morning during lambing season.

I said that Sunny was an inside-only cat. He got outside two or three times. I saw him run around the corner of the house and into the crawl space. There is a one-room size cellar and the rest is a crawl space (which I crawled into while calling him.) That was the last I saw of him for days. I walked up and down the road and gave out flyers to the neighbors. Then I put a bowl of food under the house. It was eaten but how to know if it was a rat or opossum? My daughter gave me the idea of getting a trail camera. So this is a photo from that camera. Every night he showed up sometime after midnight and then again in early morning. I can’t remember how I got him back this time—if I was able to entice him to come to me (note favorite toy hanging near the food) or if I borrowed a live trap.

This is over a year later and we did it again. He is in the trap here but the door didn’t shut. I spent a few days trying to make this work.

Notice this photo is taken 24 hours after the one above. Eventually I caught him but I don’t remember details.

About 6 months ago I realized that I was scooping the cat box at least twice a day and filling bags after bag with wet cat litter, and we noticed that Sunny didn’t race through the house like he used to. I talked to the vet and found that drinking a lot of water, and therefore urinating copious amounts, is a symptom of diabetes. Sunny was 8 years old and that is prime time for cats to develop diabetes. We ran very expensive blood tests and that was the diagnosis. For the last six months I gave Sunny insulin injections twice a day, and he ate an expensive special diabetic cat food, at first limited to a small amount twice/day that the vet recommended. Eventually we upped the amount of food because he was ravenous all the time. I upped the insulin. Even with more adjustments to amount of insulin and amount of food, he didn’t seem to get better. I had been using glucose monitors (at first one that was attached and later by pricking his ear to get a drop of blood) but the level never seemed to change. Sunny was not the same cat he was before all of this—he was lethargic and was less able to jump up on the dryer to get to his food dish. Two weeks ago we decided to euthanize him. I agonized over this decision—it would have been an easier one if there was something more obvious that we knew would get worse and was causing pain. In the long run I think this was the kinder outcome than a continual slow decline.

One of my favorite pictures of Sunny.

Sunny is buried at the edge of the pasture along with some of the dogs. Dan made this marker because I had been talking about putting something in the ground besides the concrete blogs that were on top of the graves. I don’t want to forget where they are. He will make some for the dogs too.