Osa, Adieu

Hobbes has come out from behind the sofa. Who knows what’s going on in his little pea-brain, but I suspect he knows that Osa is no longer lurking outside every window and door, waiting to give chase. The Himalaya Anxocare mashed up with a tad of sardine in the cat food couldn’t have hurt.

Noir has returned to her nasty hissing self- except when she’s hungry. I think I liked it better when she was in hiding.

Buddha is Buddha. Inscrutable. I wonder if he misses his camp buddy. Dogs are like that. He moped around the house for weeks after my granddaughter Maiya left.

I’m the one who misses Osa, though her departure has had the instantaneous effect of making my life easier. Yesterday, I hung some wash up on the lines on the porch. By the time the rain started, as it does almost every day in the rainy season, most of the clothes were dry, but not all. I was relieved to be able to leave them out there, waiting for this morning’s sun. If Osa were here, I’d have to take them down, damp, so she wouldn’t yank them off the line, rough them up, and drag them around the floor.

When rain is pounding on our tin roof; thunder is booming overhead, and lightening scorches the earth all around us, I am so very happy not to have Osa begging at the porch windows to come inside with the rest of us. When I couldn’t let her inside, I felt like the evil stepmother. I hated that the most.

I was relieved and happy when Osa left, despite the circumstances of her departure. I had been worried that there hadn’t been a Plan B for Osa’s care. That’s why I’d wrestled with my objections before making the decision that we just couldn’t handle her. I hadn’t wanted to put her owners in the position of trying from afar to find alternate care, and- well- I’d volunteered!

My short-lived relief was shattered last night, when I received an email from her owners. “Osa’s been put down humanely,” they said. “Vets and other experts have agreed that Osa’s chicken-killing ways can’t be cured,” they said. Like us, they didn’t want to tie her up for the rest of her life.

“Please don’t feel badly about this,” they said. “Osa was what she was, and you could not have affected this one way or another.” I know they’re right, but I can’t help crying for her.