My mother-in-law had taken in a stray cat and named her Boots. For some unknown reason, she had not gotten Boots spayed, but Boots didn’t have kittens until the year after my mother-in-law died. My husband Clayton and I were preparing her house for renting so we were there to feed the cats every day. I became very attached to one of the kittens and started calling it Carter after the handsome doctor that Noah Wyle played on the TV show ER.

One afternoon my best friend and my son’s godmother called me and told me the strangest story. She had been to the auto body shop just below the house we were preparing to rent and ran into my husband there. After Clayton left, they noticed a little kitten in the corner crying. My friend Sandy, being as cat crazy as I am, naturally took it home. When she called me to tell me about it and described the little kitten, I exclaimed “That sounds like Carter!”. Sandy brought it down to my house and sure enough it was Carter. She took him to the veterinarian to be neutered and they called her later that morning to tell her that Carter didn’t need to be neutered but spayed and that he was not Carter but was Carterette. We both had a good laugh out of that one. She changed the kitten’s name to Sweet Pea and has her to this day.

By this time, Boots had disappeared and the mother of Sweet Pea had a litter of kittens. We also found homes for these kittens with the exception of one that my son John picked out that he wanted to keep. It was a little black and white boy that John named Moo because he looked like a little moo cow. Since then he has had several nicknames such as King Moo, Moojus Poojus, and Moo Moo. Because he sits on their cat tree in the window and watches everything that happens in my Mom and Daddy’s house next door and watches down the road, my Daddy began calling him the Mayor of Mimosa Street. My son John was about 12 years old when we got Moo and he jokingly named everything after him using his nickname Moojus. For example, there were Moojus books, Moojus shirts, Moojus lights, Moojus everything. One day when I was out of town with a good friend, she wanted to go to Best Buy to purchase a scan disc for her computer. Neither of us could remember what it was called so she phoned my son to ask him since she knew he was proficient in computers. I didn’t know what he told her until we got into the store and she asked for a Moojus stick. I had to walk away because I was laughing so hard. I would love to have been able to capture the look on the employee’s face as he excused himself to go in the back supposedly to see if they had any Moojus sticks in stock.

King Moo remains the alpha cat in our house. He walks around like a tiger and thrives on tormenting Princess Puff. He growls at people he sees outside that he doesn’t recognize and always growls at the water meter man. He can be so sweet and lovable one minute and the next he’s cat cursing, mumbling and growling. He is one of the most unique cats we have ever had. As tough as he acts, he is horribly frightened of storms and hides under the bed half an hour before they hit. Another interesting thing is that Sweet Pea and King Moo are the only cats that we know the whereabouts of that are the decendents of Boots, and they belong to my best friend and I.