The Cat Lady (of Ghent, Belgium)

I've been wanting to tell this story for over a month now. Originally, my plan was to post pictures and stories chronologically until I caught up with the present. Since blogging is not my full time job, that plan hasn't worked so well. So here's an out-of-order, out-of-the-ordinary experience:

Earlier this year in January, I was Ghent for a 2 week long Intensive Program on Biorenewables. On Saturday the 21st everybody left to go back to their respective countries, and I was waiting for another day to take the train from Ghent to Graz, Austria. One of the things I wanted (read: badly needed) to do was wash my clothes. Fortunately a laundromat was near the hostel, looking pretty much the same as they are in the U.S.: filthy floors and dryers big enough for people to climb into.

When I first arrived at the laundromat I noticed a woman wearing a dark fur coat and an orange knit stocking hat that stood 12 inches tall. She was emptying the contents of her purse onto a table and muttering to herself. Judging from the smell and the mess, she was cleaning a spilled bag of loose leaf tobacco out from her purse. I went about starting a load of laundry in a washer and walked back to the hostel to get a book to read while waiting. When I got back to the laundromat she was gone, and I was secretly glad. I wasn't very comfortable doing laundry on a Saturday night in an unknown neighborhood, and her presence added to the creepiness factor. I soon learned that I judged her too quickly.

She came back. She sat two seats away from me as I was reading and started muttering again. At least, I thought she was muttering. It turned out she was talking to me in Dutch. Or maybe it was French. I'm pretty sure it was Dutch, and when I said "I'm sorry?" which really means "Do you speak English?" she switched to English. I love multi-lingual Europeans. She was complaining about having to wash her comforter because one of her cats urinated on it. And there the conversation started. It started about her cats, and mostly revolved around them. She was odd, and she had alot of cats (11), but she was also quite friendly and extremely interesting to talk to.

She told me she owned 11 cats right now. Previously, she owned close to 30 at a time. And although she loved them, they were hard to take care of. It was expensive to feed them, and when they got sick it was especially difficult. I don't think she took them to a vet, because she butchered them when they died. That is not a typo, read that last sentence again. If you look closely at her picture, on her hat is a cat skull. This is something I noticed her wearing as soon as I saw her, and while we were talking she proudly told me about it. In the eye sockets she put little lights, and the battery pack was underneath the skull. She was an artist, a musician, and a model, she told me. She made paintings and made lamps. I guess you could say she worked in several mediums. She carried pictures of her art with her, in the now-tobacco-free purse.

She also made house lamps out of her dead cat's skulls and showed me several pictures. She did all the cleaning of the bones herself by boiling them. I can't remember what she said she did with the furs, but she used them to. Maybe hats or coats? It might have been coats, because she told me specifically that the coat she was wearing at the moment was NOT cat skin. I remember feeling disappointed.

The paintings she made used fluorescent paint, and seemed to be abstracts of people's faces. She liked to put battery powered lights in the eyes of her paintings as well, and pointed out that feature in the photos. Often she gave the art she made as gifts to people, to thank them for their kindness. I wondered to myself if these people knew they were getting cat skull lamps.

But it wasn't just a one-sided conversation. She asked me what I was doing in Belgium, and how I liked it. I told her how I going to study in Graz, and she wished me well. This was not a crazy woman obsessed with her cats, incapable of talking about anything else. She probably liked cats more than the average person, though.

We talked for more than half an hour, and I learned many interesting things about her. She played several musical instruments, and was currently learning to play the lute. She worked as a model, both in her younger days and now. One of the pictures she showed me was taken of her recently wearing the same hat she was wearing in the laundromat. I desperately wanted to take her picture, but knew that I had to get her permission. There was a break in the conversation when she got up to transfer her clothes to a dryer and I dug in my backpack for my camera. Somehow she saw this out of the corner of her eye and said "Don't take my picture!". I told her that I wasn't, but that I wanted to ask her if I could. Her answer was yes, and it turned out all she really wanted was time to fix her hair, adjust her hat, and put on her nice glasses. Look at that pose in the picture! You could tell she was a model.

I first came to the laundromat and saw a creepy, muttering woman cleaning tobacco out of her purse. By the time I had left the laundromat, I made a new friend and learned about her hobbies. Granted, I forgot her name and will probably never see her again, but it was a great experience. She was a friendly and kind woman, with an interesting life.