Pippin Rose Durkee

When we first got Pippin, we didn't know if we were going to keep her. We were going to do a 'trial period' of a few days. We didn't know if our older cat would like her or not, so we were going to take her back if it didn't seem like they could get along. They didn't get along...but the first night we had her, she curled up in our bed and just purred. I knew that I was done for at that moment. Keeping her in the family involved some hardship, but we got to the month mark and things leveled out. She and her big brother liked to spar but they got used to each other, played with each other, played outside together, and both kept our feet warm at night.

She loved to ride around on my shoulders. Every time I picked her up, she'd scramble onto my shoulders and just lie there, pleased as punch. She kept me company in this manner every morning while I put breakfast together. When I would take a nap in my chair, it wouldn't be very long and she'd curl up and sleep with me, purring the whole time. When she was just brand new in our family, I went into the guest room to look for her, only to see this tiny lump under the comforter...Pippin was burrowed in and sleeping. She burrowed everywhere, usually poking her head out when we started calling for her. She chased the blinds covering our sliding door. She picked taffies out of our candy jar and batted them around the house. She kept us up at night with that little trick a time or two. Her brother, a messy eater, would always knock food out of his bowl onto the floor...she would vacuum it right up. She tore up a page of my Bible chasing after one of my bookmarks when we weren't home. She climbed Shaun's dress shirts to get to the top shelf of our closet, earning her the name Bratso, while her brother is Fatso. She loved to be outside, and would jump over her brother on her way out the door. Her nicknames were Pippy, Pipperson, Skippy, Skipperson, Rose, Rosie, Rosie-Posy, Skip...she probably didn't even get a chance to learn her real name because we called her by so many others. Shaun called us Team Durkee...the running joke was that we were going to have t-shirts made for the whole 'family.'

Our sweet little gal was hit by a car, and is hopefully chasing butterflies in a happy place where kitties go when their nine lives are up. She was just about six months old, and we were looking forward to a lot of years of chasing her around, and her chasing her brother around, and maybe someday our kids pulling her tail and giving her some of the trouble she gave us. We had just a short time with her, but she sure gave us a lot of happy memories, and she will be sorely missed.