Stella is a beautiful tortoiseshell calico with long, silky hair that she won’t allow anyone to touch. Stella has a cranky disposition, and she likes to be in charge. She is a small cat with a tremendous personality. That personality got her a supporting role in Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay. In the story, the heroine rescues Stella from a drain culvert in the opening scene.
Stella’s real rescue story is that Hans and I were out walking our big dog Jed, when Stella came out of a culvert and ran toward us, crying for help. She was a tiny kitten at the time, maybe eight weeks old at most. I asked Stella how she’d ended up in a culvert on a lonely country road, and she let me know that she and her mother had been dumped there. Stella’s mother ran into the woods, leaving her behind.
Stella allowed me to pick her up, and we brought her home to live at Dragonfly Pond Farm. Her sweet and affectionate demeanor ended as soon as she’d eaten enough food to fill her belly. Since then, her only use for humans has been to refill the food dishes and keep the water fresh.
I didn’t push her. We have plenty of animals who crave affection, and others who prefer for humans to keep their distance. There’s room for all kinds here. But Stella changed a few weeks ago. When I did energy healing for Mimi’s too-sensitive skin, Stella started following me around and meowing as if she wanted to be petted. But when I obliged, she’d hiss at me and run off.
It didn’t take a rocket science degree to figure out what she wanted. I started doing energy healing for Stella. She continued to ask for interaction, and I obliged by running my hands along her back and sides, hovering a couple of inches above her hair rather than actually touching.
We’ve done four energy healing sessions for Stella over the period of about a month, with the agenda of calming her overly sensitive nerve endings and increasing her Wei Qi, one of the body’s energetic protective barriers. Today, for the first time since her kittenhood, Stella allowed me to stroke her silky hair. She’s making progress!
