The Death of Buckwheat The Second

Our cat's friend Buckwheat The Second died yesterday.

He'd been dying a fairly slow death, getting more and more yellow with each passing day. You would have thought he had jaundice.

Our cat Patches doesn't have a lot of friends. She might consider the wife and I friends. But more likely she thinks of us as just "The Laps" or "The Keepers of the Cat Chow."

And Smokey -- the neighbor's cat -- is certainly no friend. Patches despises her with a passion. Smokey is always sneaking into our back yard and Patches doesn't like it one bit. That's Patches' yard. Smokey is definitely no friend.

But Buckwheat The Second was a friend.

Patches would come up from her room in the morning and one of the first things she would do after she got a drink of water, would be to visit Buckwheat The Second. She'd brush her face against him and nibble on him.

Who would have thought that a cat could be friends with a little pot of wheat grass?

But Patches loves grass. When we let Patches out in our backyard to roam she always finds some long piece of grass she can chew on. That's one of the reasons we bought Buckwheat The First at PetCo this past December.

In the winter yard, long pieces of grass are hard to find. And even more so after I mowed the lawn right before Christmas to clean it up.

Back then, Patches was having a hard-time finding a piece of grass in the yard of suitable length that she could chew on.

She actually looked depressed when she would come back in the house from her morning romps outside. Can a cat suffer from S.A.D.?

And so we bought Buckwheat The First and placed his plastic pot on a foam plate next to her feed bowl.

At first Patches didn't know what to make of Buckwheat The First. She knew it was grass, but this grass was inside, not outside. It wasn't right.

But Buckwheat The First was resilient and determined. He was always there sitting by her feed bowl to greet her in the morning. He finally wore Patches down. Patches decided it was OK for grass to be inside. Patches didn't even seem to mind that he had jaundice. Jaundice must be an common ailment with wheat grass.

But Buckwheat The First eventually withered away in January and so, we bought Buckwheat the Second. Patches didn't even seem to notice that a new pot of wheat grass was beside her bowl. She would moosh her face into The Second just as she did to The First.

I fully intended to re-pot Buckwheat The Second -- not wanting a repeat ending like we had with his predecessor, but then the ice-storm hit and I got busy and yadda, yadda, yadda. That's probably why he died last night.

Actually he probably died last week. He was starting to get that kind of ripe compost odor about him. It was time for him to go.

Will there be a Buckwheat The Third? Maybe, but not until next December. Right now, the grass is greening up and Patches has a yard full of friends.

Thank God for spring.

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My Google Search Results for this week have shrunk to 306. I guess I'm going to have to result to bribery if I want to get over 500 anytime soon.