Memories of winters past: frozen cats

By Kimberly Dreese
College Life Editor

    Although the amount of snowfall I receive at home in central PA is unsubstantial compared to more northern latitudes, in previous years we have had our fair share. 

    In the early nineties, several blizzards blanketed the area with more snow than anything I have seen since.  I was only four during the worst one, but I remember leaning against the back of the couch in my Disney princess nightgown and watching the snow slide off the roof to cover up our entire picture window—over nine feet high.

    Our mailboxes disappeared beneath a drift, and my parents shoveled so much out of our driveway that the piles stretched too high to throw any more on top.  Our pickup truck was an amorphous blob under a vast snowy mass.  We cleared narrow paths to our lumber pile and driveway, and waited for hours for a state plow to uncover our road. 
Photo credit Flickr user gammpart
In my lifetime, I have encountered not one, but two cats who have had unfortunate run-ins with freezing temperatures.
    At the time this massive snowfall transpired, we had a cat, Lynx.  She was our only pet, and she was so exasperated by my constant childish badgering that she spent most of her time outside, even, as it turns out, during blizzards. 

    At some point during this shoveling, Lynx apparently decided that the lure of a warm house was worth dealing with my shenanigans and approached the front door.  Unfortunately for Lynx, my dad chose this moment to force over two feet of snow off the roof directly above her. 

    The snow rained down on Lynx and trapped her against our outer glass door.  My family had no idea that she was trapped until my sister chose to film the snowy landscape and throw open our inner front door to illustrate how high the drifts had risen, revealing a frantically mewling Lynx plastered against the glass.

    My mom quickly cut across our yard and dug a hole to the door, where she triumphantly seized Lynx with one hand and plucked her out of the snow.  The clumps of snow that had frozen to her fur and whiskers melted slowly in front of the heat of our coal stove.  After a brief thaw and a can of wet food, Lynx made a full recovery.

    Sadly, this wasn’t the last frozen cat that I would encounter in my life.   My family had another cat, Norbert, for most of my high school and early college years.  Although Norbert only liked me when I fed him, and most of the time I wished he was a dog, I still enjoyed his company.

    During my freshman year at Lycoming, I came home briefly at the end of January to celebrate my sister’s birthday.  In the middle of a nice dinner at the Lewisburg Hotel, my father announced nonchalantly that Norbert had died the previous week. 

    This revelation put an abrupt stop to the passage of the forkful of fettuccine alfredo I held in front of my lips.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, he chuckled and quickly added that because the ground was frozen from the recent snowfall, he and my mom had placed Norbert in a Tupperware container and stored him in the bottom of our freezer.  I had been home earlier that day and opened the same freezer to reach for a tub of ice cream, unknowingly coming within inches of my dead and frozen cat. 

    My cat ownership has been marked by a series of unfortunate occurrences.  While Lynx was buried in the snow and Norbert’s body was stored in some Tupperware and frozen, I had another cat that met an even worse fate.  Dexter, who was named after the iconic cartoon Dexter’s Laboratory, spent most of his early days being paraded around in my Cinderella carriage and dressed up in various frilly outfits.  One day, however, he was snatched up and carried off by a barn owl. 

    In retrospect, maybe I should stick with owning dogs in the future.