That was her full name, tiny ball of six-or seven-week old, gray-apricot, half-Persian kitten, christened by my mother one late September afternoon in 1995. Autumn was my mother’s favorite season. Especially October. It was the month in which she was married; in which I, last of four, was born; and in which, as it happened, she would die.
The tiny kitten had been rescued along with her mother and brother by a friend; could I take one? Not so much, single mother of a 7-year old boy, in graduate school, living in a brownstone with one cat already. But my parents were without any pets for the first time in, forever. Maybe was time again?
Spoiler alert, this post is more than twice as long as any other I will write and took me many days to write for crying.
Mum was furious when we showed up for a weekend with a box and this fluff ball inside. After years and years of menagerie, she was good with having the pet department at 0. Ok, I said, I’ll bring her back home.
I made myself scarce and came back a few hours later to find her watching the 11 oz. fluff ball rolling around in a patch of sun on the kitchen floor. Without preamble she announced, “Her name is Autumn Smoke, because she is like a wisp of Autumn Smoke.” And that was that.
Autumn Smoke became Autumn. She found a best friend in Murph, the orange and white male goofball next door who was simply besotted with her. He would follow her around endlessly, and he was a rare animal that she pretty much tolerated. When I visited with my dogs, detente was fragilely maintained with Autumn hiding in the nether reaches of the house, taking her meals in the basement, with the occasional exciting face-to-face confrontation, spitting, hissing, and brief chasing.
Her feistiness would assume mythic proportions. It required both my parents, my father wearing the fireplace gloves, to get her into the carrier for a vet visit. And at the vet, she had quite the reputation. Her default expression seemed to be sort of, angry.
She was just not quite right in some catly ways. Could not stand any fish or fish flavors of food. But she was crazy for anything pork. However she did love her catnip.
If my parents would have someone in to feed her when they went away, there was a warning: beware the stealth attack from behind. Many an unsuspecting ankle was bitten. And she would bite my parents when they returned.
Mum always claimed that Autumn just tolerated her, her who fed, cared for, cleaned the box of, and that it was my father to whom Autumn was devoted. She was not entirely wrong, though I know Autumn loved both my parents in her own feisty way. But it was Dad on whose lap Autumn would usually be found, on top of snoring Dad that Autumn slept.
Sixteen years after her arrival, Autumn would see Mum leave the house, never to come home. In those last weeks, when Mum was no longer there but had not yet passed, I wonder what Autumn must have felt. One morning when I was headed down the stairs and out to cover the day shift, something made me turn around on the landing. There at the top of the stairs sat Autumn, in all her fluffy leonine glory, staring at me unnervingly with her saucer eyes. I may have said something, I can’t remember. But before I could turn around and head back down, she winked her left eye. Completely, without question. Maybe a nervous tic I’d never seen before, but seemed like a wink, like, all’s ok, and I could not help but grin. I told Mum, and she smiled, too.
Nine months later Dad and Autumn left the house for a new town and an apartment. Gone then the days of out-all-night mousing, but she had a big windowsill to sit in, and plenty of visitors. A few months after the move, a growth on her leg, benign but nefarious, came back a fourth time, and the leg would require amputation. I wondered if she had had enough, was she ready to go, even if it meant leaving Dad. 
She was 17 now, but still healthy in so many ways and the word was she could handle it. And she did. I got her stairs to ease jumps to bed or couch and she got along just fine.
There were more than a few close calls—at least two trips up to take her to the vet, tearful for most of the hour and a half drive, thinking this could be it, but no, she had a few of her nine lives yet. But early this spring, with Dad more frail now, we had to move Autumn out. Fortunately, to a caring friend and her family. She had developed some usual age-related issues including pancreatitis, chronic but managed, until it was clear it wasn’t. After a few months back in a lively home with sunny windowsills and tasty homecooked treats, it was clear she was ready to go.
And so on a stormy early July afternoon, she and I shared a tasty piece of bacon. Then she curled up on her hot-pink fleece bed in her adopted family’s sunroom and half dozed as I talked to her, about how she would see Mum again, and Murph, and how she would be there for Dad when it was his time. Then the vet came, and Autumn slept, and passed, and now I believe is in a land of endless pork, and all-night mousing, and ever-welcoming laps. Even with ankles waiting to be bit, perhaps. Though she seemed to outgrow that in her mellow (relatively speaking) elder age.
Happy mousing, feisty fluff ball, faithful friend with twitching tail and ageless gaze. We miss you, xo