Meow - The Third Spring
Sat., March 2, 12:15 PM
I don’t want to be the home base for all the cats in the neighborhood. I don’t even want “our cats” – the ones that grew up in my yard – to consider this their territory. So beyond feeding them once a day, I try not to encourage them.
I know that they’re finding food elsewhere, because if I’m too late coming out in the morning, there are fewer cats waiting for me. I don’t ever give them water; I figure they can find water wherever other wild animals find it. We are on the edge of a marsh, after all.
Precious taught her babies to hide under my front steps; they would disappear there as soon as a human approached. Dos-a’s kittens hid there the following year. I don’t think any of the adult cats can fit through. In any case, as spring approached, I decided to stop up the openings with leaves, rocks and dirt to discourage them.
However, I noticed somebody digging away at my work, and I suspected that Dos-a was about to present us with another litter. Eventually there were little faces peeking out from underneath, but they weren’t Dos-a’s after all. ’Puter had delivered her kittens someplace else, but she knew where to bring them as soon as they were old enough to walk.
There were four this time. We continued the computer language, since they were the offspring of ’Puter. Another gray tabby was named Scuzzi. Two black ones – completely interchangeable – were Boris and Top Cat. And a pretty little all gray, who looked like Smoky or Not Smoky, was called WYSIWYG.
Wysi is a feisty little fellow. He mews loudly for food, and he stands in the middle of the dish to eat. He tries to hiss ferociously when he’s picked up, but he just makes you laugh. Despite his reluctance to be held, he is friendly enough to allow an occasional pat.
Within a couple of weeks, there was another litter, hiding under a junked car. Dos-a also had delivered elsewhere but brought her babies to us. One is gray and white. He looks so much like Hey Boy that we called him Screenshot. (Hey Boy, incidentally, is neutered; the resemblance is coincidental.) And there were two calicos, my favorite kind of cat. We called the calicos GUI and Floppy (a port, a disk), but GUI, with her pretty face, soon became Shana Punum.
Heaven help us, we were now “home” to fourteen cats, not to mention all the hangers-on who came by to scrounge food. And about half of them are gray tabbies, so that I can’t always tell who’s who. That became the source of yet another silly story.
For the most part, the cats don’t come in when I open the garage door; they know the food is going to be outside. But my daughter decided to give them some extra food one evening. Unfortunately, the door between the garage and the cellar was open, and someone found a nice warm space.
I saw it only as a flash, a gray tabby. At first I thought it was one of the girls looking for a place to have kittens, but when Hey Boy came downstairs, our intruder marked what he was considering his territory. Phew! Who could it be? Murphy, I guessed, I think he’s the only male tabby. A couple of times he actually came out and stared at me from a distance, but he wouldn’t come close, which was unusual for Murphy. There’s too much stuff downstairs to make a search easy, and so I just left him there, thinking he’d come out when he was ready. Eventually he did. All the others were busy eating outside when I opened the inner door, and after a few minutes there was a flash of gray as whoever he was ran out and disappeared.
He came back, of course. I pointed him out to my daughter, and she said, “that’s not one of our cats.” You could have fooled me. As a matter of fact, I guess he did! All I have to do now is deodorize the cellar. And I definitely have to dissuade the cats from going under the steps. Mothballs, maybe?
