My Watermark is Grand River, Ontario.

I pretty well have lived on top of the water, or in it, but I think one of my favourite memories involving water is about my pet cat Suzie that I had when I was about 7 years old.

Suzie was my favourite cat and my best friend. She had shiny black fur with a small tuft of white, under her chin.She would go for walks with me along the Grand River bank, where I lived.She would jump on the toboggan as we slid down the hill and onto the frozen river.She would run along beside me as I skated and slide on the ice that was frozen like a sheet of silky smooth glass. In the summer time, when I would hop into the row boat to go for a row, she would stand on the dock and meow until I came back to pick her up. She would jump into the boat and row out to the middle of the river with me, then she would jump out, into the water and swim back to the shore. She didn’t mind the water at all, unlike most cats who hate water. I loved the river, so she did too, because I was her best friend as well.

She used up all of her 9 nine lives. One time she got stuck for a week inside an old Hamilton Street car that a neighbour down the road had in his backyard. Another time she was missing for about 5 days and showed up crying at our back door with a muskrat trap on her leg. She must have pulled the trap out of the ground, which would have been secured by a steak and dragged herself home, pulling it behind her, from wherever she had travelled. That was an expensive trip to the vet. She had an infection & required many stitches. We were broken hearted and so worried, but she recovered and mended very well. She would sometimes catch field mice and bring them home to "show off." Occasionally we wouldn’t look at her to examine if she had anything in her mouth before letting in the house and she would sneak in a "live one", which would terrorize my rodent fearing mother, until my sister or I could catch it and throw it outside.

I loved that cat so much. She was a constant source of entertainment and companionship, both on land and in the water.