Can You Hear Me!?

This sweet little cat is the petite dynamo Smidgen. Smidgen was the immediate successor to the Clancy ( AKA The Grey Menace) and the predecessor to Xenia ( Empress of all she surveys). Yes, you can see where this is headed. To look so sweet and be so imperious – it took talent.
A real New England cat with those big double-clawed mitts she hailed from Neptune Street in the heart of the Joppa neighborhood of Newburyport. Joppa was the old seafarer’s area of town, and for ancestry, she claimed ships cats going back to the Mayflower.
We found her attended by her mother just before the mother and their human family moved.
Smidge was the last unadopted kitten of the litter. We came along just in time for mama to give us the twice over and decide that we’d do for her little princess. So, after an interview with her human family, we scooped the little black kitten up and returned to the car for the trip home. In the car, the princess swooned, pretended to faint, and generally let us know that she was a delicate soul and needed exquisite care. This behavior set the mode for the next twenty years.
Smidgen was a great talker. She had an opinion on nearly everything and would gladly share it if you were interested or not. However, she did not like to be ignored and happily grabbed you with those mitts filled with claws if you did not take her seriously enough.
As the years rolled on, trouble developed between Smidgen and my wife; my wife became progressively deaf and unable to hear Smidgen’s diatribes. If she didn’t turn on her hearing aids, she could barely hear Smiden.
Smidgen did not like this; all her utterances were worthy of deep consideration. One day Smidgen was trying to get my wife’s attention, so she turned up her hearing aids. Smidgen was doing the cat equivalent of screaming at my wife. As the volume went up, she could now hear the cat screaming. But as my wife later told me, Smidgen was not only screaming; she was also using her mouth to make exaggerated movements.
It was the cat equivalent of people talking loud to the hard of hearing and making exaggerated lip movements -talk loud, gesticulate, and over pronounce everything while asking, ” Can…you…hear…me?”
We confirmed that this was behavior reserved only for my wife by watching the cat with other household members. a unique cat.