Member-only story
Memories Contained Within Objects (Part 1)
The porcelain cat
My paternal grandmother died when I was ten or eleven years old. I feel like I knew her very well but simultaneously did not know her properly. She and my grandfather had only lived in the same city as us for a few years before her death. When they moved to Perth, it became a tradition to go to their house every Sunday after church. We would have a very English lunch (or was it dinner?) of potato salad and cold meats followed by fruit cake.
She had a little porcelain cat that sat on her kitchen windowsill, looking out onto the backyard. About the size of a mug, it is ginger coloured and sits upright, always looking at something. It is not a very remarkable ornament but I asked to keep it after my grandmother passed away. It came with me as I moved out of home and accompanied me from sharehouse to sharehouse. Eventually, when I moved in with my, now, spouse, it became the kitchen windowsill porcelain cat for our house. It doesn’t have a backyard to gaze upon, but there are sometimes birds that flit about the ivy covering the fence beyond our kitchen window.
We had a little tabby cat, Millie, for about a year. She was allowed out during the daytime, not a practice I keep now with cats, as they are so merciless. One day Millie was hit by a car and a neighbour brought her body over. I buried her…
