For the last several months, especially the last few months, I've been feeling like we were grabbing Cobweb, holding her down, and doing mean things to her several times a day. We were trying to help her, of course, but I'm sure it didn't look like that from her side of things. Sometimes when I reached down just to pet her, she would run away from me, clearly reacting to how often we tortured her. Watching her run from me was heartbreaking.
I was telling Shannon today that before the last few months, I'd never seen her run from me before ... but it triggered a really funny memory of her, a memory that makes me smile. I actually do remember her running from me once previously. When she was young, she loved tomatoes. If I ate anything with tomatoes or tomato sauce, she would hover around eagerly, sniffing the air. When she was maybe 2 years old, I was making myself some spaghetti, and I had put the cooked noodles in a bowl and put some tomato sauce on them, and I had turned around just for a brief second to take the pot off the stove and put it in the sink. When I turned back around, I saw Cobweb on the table with her head in the bowl of spaghetti. I shouted and ran at her, and she took off like a shot, with a long strand of spaghetti dangling out of her mouth, leaving a trail of spaghetti sauce behind her. Even at the time, with my dinner ruined and my apartment floor and furniture slimed with tomato sauce, I couldn't help laughing and laughing. Good memories.