Janson

Yesterday was a sad day at the Winberry house as we lost our grey cat Janson. While there are a few of you that didn't know we even had a cat there are others that didn't realize we actually had two as Janson was rarely ever seen by others outside of our immediate family. Poor little guy definitely was the living definition of a scaredy cat and even though he was a part of our family for 10 years he never really warmed up to anyone except David.

We are so sad for our loss but in some ways realize it is a blessing to him as he has not been happy for some time and we were often afraid that Jordan, our tortoise colored cat, would go before him and leave him utterly and totally lost by himself.

It's very sad to think that Jordan is now the last of the 5 original, yes 5, cats that we had living with us at one time. I guess I should go back and give a little history........

In October of 2000 David's sister and her family were in town visiting us at our old house in Lowell. The kids discovered 4 kittens in one of the empty lots around our house. It appeared that they had either been abandoned by their mother or dumped off by their owner. We decided to take them in with the understanding that we would find homes for them as we did not have any intentions of keeping all of them. However, if I'm being absolutely honest we didn't try very hard and days turned into weeks, week into months and we still had them. David and I had always wanted a grey cat so something possessed us to go to the pound where we crazily decided when you have 4 cats what really is one more and this is when we made the decision to bring home a 6 week old grey kitty to join our already large heard of cats.

From the get go Janson was always a little different and while he liked our other cats well enough he was just always very scared and something was always not quite right about him. I have seriously never seen an animal so skittish. He was more of our night crawler as he didn't really come out much during the day but seemed to enjoy being out at night.

After a few months we lost Cali, our calico kitty, to a car accident; Cana, our black and white cat, was killed right as we were moving out of David's parents house into the house we are in today (we stayed with them for a while as our house in Lowell sold earlier than expected and our new house wasn't finished yet) and this left us with Jasper, our all black cat, Janson and Jordan.

One day after only being in our house for a few weeks we couldn't find Jasper so David decided to go across the street to see if our neighbors had seen him and if he might have accidentally wandered over to their house and gotten locked into their garage. David said as soon as he asked if they had seen our cat our neighbor immediately burst into tears and her husband had to come to the door to let David know she had accidentally ran over him (they didn't realize it was our cat). She later came to the house bringing flowers and apologizing through teary eyes which was so sweet and I felt just as bad for her as I did for ourselves as I know she felt horrible and this was definitely not the way either families had planned on meeting one another.

I'm sure that Jordan will be fine as she has always had a bit of spunk to her even though she was the runt of the group. Even though we didn't see Janson very much as he typically stayed out of sight I'm actually more sad than I thought I would be and hate to know that he is not out hiding in our garage some place. While he was always very scared of us he still always let us know in his own awkward way that he liked us and he will be missed.

The Crew

Cali & Janson
Cana

Janson & Jasper

Jordan
Janson