We’ve found that when we meet someone new, one of the best icebreakers is to ask them if they have a pet. Most people have a pet in their life, and they are excited to talk about their animal friend(s). Because pets are important. They provide companionship and affection to their owners. And a pet’s love is unconditional, which is often difficult to find among people. So it’s appropriate to introduce our blog by writing about some of the pets in our lives.

Only a year after we were married, we adopted two kittens. They were our first pets as a couple. Friends of ours rescued a litter of kittens that someone had abandoned in the street and left to die. Our friends were desperate to find good homes for the cats. We took two kittens from the litter, and named them Socks and Gremlin. They were adorable, as all kittens are, but Gremlin was a mischief and troublemaker from the start.

At the time we didn’t know much about how to care for cats. When Deb landed her first job as a teacher in a one-room school house at a Hutterite colony, we rented a U-Haul and took two trips to move our belongings to the village of Halkirk. On the first trip we brought our cats, and decided to leave them in the house while we went back for the second load. After all, what trouble could they get into?

Big mistake. When we arrived with the second load, we heard an incessant meowing that came from the basement. Gremlin had snooped in the basement and became trapped. The old house still had a coal storage room that had been used in the past when furnaces were heated with coal. The ten foot square coal bin was dry, but it was constructed with concrete walls that went almost as high as the basement ceiling. There was only a five inch gap between the top of the coal bin walls and the subfloor boards for the main floor above. Somehow Gremlin had crawled past that gap and had fallen into the concrete-walled room, with no way out. The shaft to the outside of the house had long been boarded over. And we had never before lived in a home with a coal bin.

We spent hours trying to rescue Gremlin. Fortunately we found a long, flat board that we slid through the gap, so that the bottom of the plank rested on the concrete floor of the coal storage room. The plank was on an incline, with the other end of the plank at the top of the coal bin. With much coaxing, Gremlin walked up the plank and crawled through the gap to safety. This incident didn’t stop Gremlin from getting into trouble for the rest of his life.

After we had children, whenever we visited their grandparents, our kids loved to play with their cat Simba. Their grandparents lived on an acreage, and Simba was an excellent mouser. And Simba was so tolerant of our small children, who often held it in positions that surely were uncomfortable for the cat. It’s amazing how patient cats and dogs can be with children. Which leads us to our next post, about Bailey, our pet Basset Hound.