Ever since I was a little kid, I have been enamored with cats. They are graceful, funny, curious, and athletic. They can run, jump, and climb in a way that makes human envious. They sometimes love humans, but other times, they seemed enamored of just parts of humans, like feet. I’ve known cats who truly love feet.
They rub the feet, sniff the feet, and climb under piles of blankets to bite the feet, which, of course, wakes up the human. As much as you love your cat, you just really don’t want to wake up to the sensation of a cat nibbling at your toes.
Of course, the cat is happy. Cats are nocturnal so they enjoy a bit of late-night toe biting.
Most cats are really cute. But some cats have more character than they have cuteness.
I remember this one cat that was… um… sort of the feline version of a pirate. He had a collection of battle scars and he prowled the streets late at night.
I often heard him late at night in some epic conflict with some feline who dared to invade his territory. And it wasn’t just a bunch of meows. It was more like angry yowling. And loud.
Not exactly musical. I used to describe this cat’s wars to my dad when he picked me up for family visits. My dad saw the cat because, well, the cat was always around, making sure that no other feline invaded his territory.
My dad pronounced this cat extremely smart. I asked my dad how a cat who had fights all night could be smart. That was when we both noticed that the cat looked both ways before crossing the street. Most cats usually just race across the street. But this one looked for traffic.
He was a rowdy cat who fought constantly and, judging by his scars, didn’t always win his fights. But yes, he was a smart cat. My dad was right about that.
Then there was the cat that I grew up with. We called him Boy. He had a very long name, that we would occasionally recite for the sake of reciting it. But it always ended up by being just Boy.
I think that we liked saying Boy because we had no boys in our family. My parents had four girls. There were no boys until the next generation. So the cat was the Boy. He was a character.
He got into a yowling and hissing fight with a cat that climbed the fire escape and stared into the window. They both made an enormous amount of noise.
But no fight because the window was shut. Well, when Boy wasn’t yowling at another cat or chasing a dog down the street (one day, he got out of the house and a dog was so startled by the enormous long-haired cat that the dog fled, with Boy following close behind), he liked to do science experiments. He especially liked to test the law of gravity.
He got on the kitchen table after one of the parental units squeezed the orange juice and walked to each juice glass, one at a time. Then he gently pawed at the glasses until they fell off the table. Once the glass fell, the cat watched the process of the glass falling, the juice spilling, and the glass landing on the floor. The parental units were not thrilled with the feline science experiments. I think that they preferred to drink the orange juice. Freshly squeezed orange juice is delicious, but cats just like to spill stuff.
Despite all of the cats’ antics, we love the heck out of them. And I am so grateful for all of the cats that I have known and loved and even for the cats that I have struggled to love.
Soooo… I am grateful for these other things that begin with the letter C:
cabbage
cookies
cake
chocolate
cheese (especially French choose)
chairs
cotton
creativity
My hubby is allergic to cats so the only ones we've had were barn cats when we lived in upstate NY. They were great to keep the mice away from the horse feed! But as for your "C" foods, I take cabbage any day!!
I love this description of cats. It brought back lots of memories. I've lived with cats most of my life since college (my family were dog people), and my first cat was a feral cat that refused to come indoors and liked to climb trees and look down at me.
In my experience cats have been foot stalkers, not toe biters, but maybe that's because I didn't let them sleep with me. A foot moving under the covers would attract a pounce with claws. Too many of those would have resulted in shredded blanket.
The cat I most adored was a tiny rescue kitty whose mom had died. I could easily fit her in the palm of my hand. I fed her milk through an eye dropper and at night she slept on my pillow, wrapping her tiny self around the top of my head. In the morning I had to carefully detangle her from my hair. At that time I also had a sweet and goofy golden retriever who was no match for this tiny critter. In no time she was chasing the dog into the living room and holding her hostage. I learned from this to never underestimate cats!