When you are no longer small, you may not fit on every wish list.
Your tail is too long, and your tale is too long, and your belly rolls out of the baby bed.
But when you are no longer small, you get the chance to be large.
Just ask Gladys and Leodis.
Gladys and Leodis have been larger than they look since the day we met. They resembled a pair of drowned ducklings, or twin tufts of frazzled grey lint. Wet and bewildered, they did not know where they were, who we were, or when their mother was coming back. (She was coming back … right?)
But even then, they knew the most important thing.
They were enormous.
It did not matter that they were smaller than their own bottle. The two sticky wisps of kitten were convinced they were colossal. They were weighty and worthy. (Surely that was why they received such a big bottle. The thing had to be eighty feet tall!)
And when a kitten is convinced of something, it is settled.
Fortunately, Gladys and Leodis had come to a place that knows what it means to be larger than you look. From the street, Tabby’s Place appears to be a one-story sanctuary. But step inside, and you will find a tower of tenderness that tickles heaven’s belly, with five thousand stories and counting.
The littlest kittens were about to be the two newest tales … make that three. Their missing mama was found. She was none other than the selfless Shirley.
All three were critically ill. We feared Shirley’s time was short, as an aggressive cancer flooded her too-young body. She had given all that she had to her kittens, but Shirley’s own sickness put them in peril. Gladys and Leodis were unkempt and underweight.
When you are this small, you are a dandelion puff of uncertainty, wrapped loosely around a heartbeat. Leodis and Gladys were larger than life inside, and fighting for life with every atom. We had no guarantees, only two kittens and one mother who needed us.
And Tabby’s Place is large enough for lumps, longings, and love’s burly bravery.
When you are a Tabby’s Place kitten, all the forces of life are on your side. Gladys and Leodis outgrew death’s grip. Shirley, robbed of her own kittenhood on the streets, outlived all expectations, getting to be a baby for the first time in the last months of her life. The kittens were adopted together, the mother was “adopted” by her feline roommates, and Tabby’s Place grew three stories taller.
It is a nice story for a children’s book.
But true stories have a way of growing.
By no fault of their own, Gladys and Leodis came back to Tabby’s Place.
We have no hard feelings. None of us is large enough to judge another. (Except Trent. Trent’s ego exceeds the size of existence. Trent’s ears jut out the ceiling of the universe. But that is another story entirely.)
The siblings started their reentry in the foster home where they had thrived before. They remembered foster papa Jeff and his family instantly. Most importantly, they rejoiced in being remembered.
Being remembered can make you large enough to face almost anything.
Even puberty.
This time around, Gladys and Leodis were teenagers. Gladys was as grouchy as a grounded seventh-grader, all angst and eye-rolling. She snarled at her own brother, as though Leodis’ wide eyes were painfully uncool, and also he should start wearing deodorant.
Leodis responded the way brothers have done since the dawn of time: “Gladys. Gladys. Gladys. Gladys. Look at me, I’m a ninja! I’m gonna save the world! I’m Leodis the Magnificent! Gladys! Gladys!” He splashed all the water out of his bowl. He trashed their shared crate (in the interest of saving the world, no doubt).
She cornered him and called him names I cannot repeat in this family-friendly blog.
We tried to joke that she was too young to act this old, but she reminded us that we were the ones who named her “Gladys.”
The cutest kittens had grown apart and grown into their awkward phase. If you have ever gone to bed adorable, only to wake up fourteen, shaped like a potato, and unsure what to do with your own long legs, you know how they felt.
But unlike you and me, Gladys and Leodis did not huddle under their headphones listening to the Counting Crows’ “Long December” on repeat.
They did what the bravest cats do.
They grew larger.
Gladys expanded her territory into new laps, draping herself like a velvet caftan over volunteers’ legs. Suite E stretched to accommodate her moods. Sometimes she purred, and sometimes she revved like an angry engine. At no time did she wonder if love could bear her weight.
Little Leodis, meanwhile, grew long as linguini in Suite I. Always the skinnier sibling, he flipped himself like a flapjack so the sun could reach all his molecules. (He is a thoughtful guy that way.) He discovered that flopping upside-down and wiggling like an electric salamander is a responsible way to raise the sum total of “slaphappy” in the universe to a scientifically significant degree.
(Like he said, he’s gonna save the world.)
Volunteers vaulted to both kittens’ side, with reassurance and wand toys. Tabby’s Place volunteers have the rare gift of making you feel like both a treasured baby kitten and the largest, most important life form in the cosmos. (This applies whether you have a tail or just a tale. These are empaths of an otherworldly order.) They told Gladys and Leodis, in word and deed, that the world still revolved around them. And since our volunteers resemble the sun, Gladys and Leodis believed.
We told them about their mother, whose courage grew until only heaven could accommodate her. We told them their day would come. We promised they had not outgrown “adorable,” and their adopters would be big enough to love them forever.
And Gladys said “um, duh.” And Leodis said, “I’m gonna save the world!”
And we all grew.
And we are all still growing.
And we hope we are making Shirley proud.