A little old lady and her cats
By Margery McCurdy Plummer
When I retired from teaching, I decided to do some volunteer work, something a little helpful that I wouldn’t get paid for, so I started delivering for the Meals on Wheels program. This lasted for seventeen years, the last four or five with help from my husband.
This was very rewarding volunteering, not only because most of the people really needed the food, but more than that, the recipients needed company and conversations, and I enjoyed meeting some wonderful and at times, “unusual” people. When I first started delivering for the program, I was warned by other volunteers about “that crazy old woman with all of the cats.”

When I arrived at Alberta Reasonover’s double wide trailer, I did find that she had a dozen or more cats, that she was old, but she wasn’t crazy. On the first visit, we talked of many things as we stood in front of a plate glass window in a room that had been attached to her trailer. That room contained a large “catch all” table, a food freezer, an old-fashioned hair dryer, and bag after bag of cat food.

When I arrived home after that first visit, I had hardly closed the door before the phone rang. It was this lady telling me in an unpleasant voice, “You’ve left my front gate open. The dogs will get in and kill my cats!”

I slipped back down there without her seeing me and closed the gate. I learned later that the dogs never got to her cats, because they hid under an old station wagon or went deep into the woods far away from the dogs. She later told me, referring to the faded grayish white station wagon, “I know it’s tacky, but it reminds me of him.” Him referred to her late husband whom she had moved to the country to study and raise herbs and enjoy the fresh air.

My trips to her house were always interesting. When she finally opened the door from the attached room to the main part of her trailer, she said that she was a little embarrassed at the way it looked. It wasn’t dirty, just very cluttered, with the entire baseboard of the rooms lined with brown paper bags held tightly at the top with clothespins. Later, we found that these bags were filled with letters, papers, seed catalogs, advertisements, newspaper clippings and the dozens of things that many people to a lesser degree save to “look over” later, but these brown bags marching all around the rooms did look a bit strange.

Alberta Resonover dressed strictly for comfort, wearing some outlandish combinations, but she had class. She had graduated from high school, an accomplishment uncommon for girls of her day. She played piano and had given piano lessons. One day she asked me to type a list of her songs that she had written, along with the themes, inspiring each one. I still have the originals written on the inside of lids to frozen cobblers.

Alberta never looked stylish. She didn’t care about that, but having been a beautician, she wore her hair stylishly wound around her head and caught in a bun over one ear.

Each of the carriers was afraid that he or she would find Alberta on the floor dead or injured. She was near ninety and had physical ailments that kept her inside. After her husband died, she withdrew and went from being a person who associated with others cautiously, to a near recluse.

It happened that I was the one who found Mrs. Reasonover on the floor of her bathroom one day. She wasn’t dead, but barely breathing. At the hospital, they found that she had suffered congestive heart failure and after a few days in the hospital, a trip home, and back to the hospital, she died.

Alberta had lived as she chose, spoke her mind, chastising charities she thought not worthy of her help and giving generously to those she thought deserving. Alberta didn’t live stylishly, but she went out in style in a beautiful gray dress, a diamond ring, and her signature hairstyle that I requested through her neice. There were fewer than ten of us at the funeral. She was laid to rest beside her husband in a cemetery in Nashville.

We hardly knew what to do with the cats that we had been feeding. A few had disappeared, but several would still come out when we went to feed them. It didn’t take long for the rest of them to disappear. Each day we would find one or two dead in the road where a speeding pickup or car had hit it. The last time we went, we found on dead on the road, and when my husband looked toward the ditch, I knew what he meant when he said, “Don’t look.” The mangled body of the little blue-gray cat that I had come to admire lay dead in the ditch.

The cats had never gone away from home before. Maybe they left because they couldn’t hear her voice calling their names when she stood in the door and fed them, or maybe it was because they couldn’t hear her footsteps, or hear her voice talking on the phone.

We drove on up to the trailer just to check. Sure enough, there was nothing there. The cats were gone. Only a double-wide trailer with a picture window looking over the beautiful hills and valley, and a once white station wagon out front which she said, “I know it’s tacky, but it reminds me of him.” remained. Alberta and her cats remain fondly in our memory.