Pixie in Paradise

AKA Mi Novio, Mo

I was having too much fun and there was so much love all around me, so I took a break from writing to embrace all of it for my last week in Puerto Viejo. I don’t exactly want to write this post but as with all of the really important things it’s best to get it out, and this is very important to me. It’s about my special guy, Mo. I’d love to keep writing about the adventures Mo and I get into and, quite frankly, the last thing I want to do right now is leave the little house that Mo and I shared on Playa Negra. I could live there forever with that cat and be the happiest, most content person I’ve ever been in this lifetime. I’m up here in San Jose now wishing I was down there with Mo and my people, and my favorite place, but I’m also incredibly joyful and grateful that I’ve had all those experiences and so much love in such a short amount of time! I also have a big underground earth house to myself and a sweet dog lives here so she keeps me company once in a while. She’s no Mo, though.

I could say something super basic like, “I’ve loved animals my whole life.” Or I could say, “I grew up in rural Wisconsin on a farm and have been around animals my whole life.” Both of these statements are true, but it’s so much deeper than that. As a child I sat in the haymow of our barn and would slowly ease toward a new litter of hissing kittens with puffed up hair, trying to look intimidating, determined to keep me away from them. I was determined to hug and kiss all of them even if I got fleas. I probably had a 50% success rate back then, sometimes more depending on the mama cat’s temperament. Sadly, I’d work hard to tame them and they’d reach early adulthood only to be taken out by any number of things an outdoor cat could get into up there: a car accident, death by wildlife predator, sub zero weather conditions, parvo or distemper. 

I was obsessed with the cats and loved giving them names. As a toddler (under the age of four) I apparently wasn’t very creative when naming them. I had an orange cat named Orange-Orange, a gray cat named Gray-Gray and a white cat named Snowball – zero points for originality.

Cats were my first true love. I adored dogs too but my dad did not allow domestic pets and definitely not in the house, so barn cats had to be enough. Feral cats are never easy to tame and many can’t be. I looked up the term “feral” to see if I was using it correctly and found a website with great descriptions of the categories our feline friends fall into. For example I learned that Pesto, my three-legged cat son back home in the US, used to be 100% feral, as I assumed. How he came to trust me and lets me spoon him on our bed a few short years later still blows my mind. Mo, my current temporary cat son in Costa Rica is actually categorized as a stray. One morning he forced me to make him a 3-course breakfast of kibble, milk and canned tuna. When I wrote this he was passed out on my bed between a silk sleep eye mask and a book of Spanish verbs. Mo might have been feral once but he walked right into my house four weeks ago, loudly announcing himself and we’ve been in love ever since. He was already relatively tame but over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen him get even more domestic. Mo spent a lot of time in the house with me during the day but he had to fend for himself at night even if that meant pretending to leave and sitting around the corner, waiting for 5am to roll around. (I actually think that’s what he did most nights when I was  around). 

Every time I type Mo’s name into my phone to send a message – which is a LOT in the last month – autocorrect changes his name to amo instead of Mo. In my experience even iPhone autocorrect won’t mess with your word once the first letter has been capitalized. Even they will admit at that point that the phone user knows more than the machine itself about what word is coming next. Except with “Mo.” I will type a capital “M” and it always changes it up. Every single time my phone switches “Mo” to “amo.” I’m still in Costa Rica where 70-80% of all people speak little to no Spanish. And in Spanish, amo means “love.” Logically, I’m sure the iPhone is being so bold with me because I am using the Spanish keyboard on my phone, rather than an English one. Still, the Universe is sending me that message, over and over again: “Mo” is the same as “love.” Sometimes this word switch happens upwards of ten times a day. Okay, it’s way more, I just didn’t want you all to get me a psych eval if and when I land back in the US.

Mo will be fine when I’m gone. This is his routine and the caretakers of the property I’m on are here six days a week so the cat gets fed, and who knows how many other places he’s scamming meals? Also, Mo can fight. I hear cat screams and moans in the distance when he’s not around and it sickens me. I worry that he won’t show up again or that he’ll show up half dead and injured and I’ll have to run around rural Costa Rica trying to find a veterinarian – even a human hospital would work, if I can ever find one! But every time, Mo showed up with that big tomcat head, and his badass walk. He showed up one afternoon with a new scratch and neither of us made a big deal of it. Mo walks around with those tomcat muscles in his thick neck, tiny paws and one testicle – I think, I’m not a veterinarian – and seemingly has more than nine lives. I’m incredibly grateful for his prowess and bravery and delighted that he is so sweet with me. Mo rolled over and showed me his belly 15 minutes after we met. He walked into my house and sat on the kitchen floor, watching me make coffee in a chorreador. We did this every single morning for 28 days straight and he also supervised the preparation of many lunches and dinners. We took several naps resulting in me picking up a few unwanted flea bites – totally worth it. We watched a poisonous dart frog walk across the kitchen floor together, and he laid next to me for countless hours while I wrote on this laptop. He was the perfect company and just what I needed at this point in the journey I am on. 

There are so many photos and videos of Mo on my phone, in the hundreds, so I created his own folder on my iPhone to start dropping them in: “Mo the Costa Rican Cat.” I also had to create new folders for the wild animals of Central America, monkeys, sloths, birds, lizards and the like. And, there’s an entirely separate iPhone folder for stray dogs and cats in all the places I visited. For example, several photos in there are of Princess (aka “Bendy” who frequents Benders Beach Bar) the best cat in Caye Caulker, Belize and the sweet chihuahuas in La Fortuna, part of the five-generation coffee farming family at Northfields. Hundreds of photos and videos of animals that don’t belong to me.

It finally occurred to me after looking for sloths again as I was walking in the jungle, and after taking the 200th video of a lizard and listening to howler monkeys all day when it rained, that animals have always provided immense comfort for me, more than any human ever could. Animals are incredibly grounding for me, even healing. We speak completely different languages, verbally and with our bodies, but for the most part humans and animals can usually find ways to express love and companionship for each other.

Mo wasn’t just any cat, he was the perfect cat, the perfect being for me and exactly who I needed after some beautiful and wild and sometimes scary adventures on this journey abroad. My thoughts are scattered this morning as I’ve been away from Puerto Viejo and Mo for 48 hours now. I miss him, I worry about him a little and more importantly I’m hoping he isn’t sad that he can’t find me. I want him to find comfort and food with other kind souls. When I pulled my suitcases to the door two days ago, Mo’s whole demeanor changed. It’s the first time he wouldn’t come toward me for some pets when I bent down and called his name. He could tell I was leaving and I guess he had some feelings about that, similar to the ones I was having. My last image of him is standing outside my front door with a very unhappy expression on that kitty face and I was in tears.

I was home there, and Mo made it feel even more like home. In fact, I’ve never felt more at home than when I was with Mo, at Casa Vikingo on Playa Negra. I will do everything I can to get back to him, as soon as possible. For now, I’m off to do some comfort eating and to buy a green cat collar for him. Over the last 30 years any animal I was the guardian of had to have a collar. Even my goats wore them. Mo will be the only one who doesn’t have to wear his collar but I’m very much looking forward to a time when I can sit and show it to him, show him that he has a guardian who will never forget him for who he is and what he did for her.