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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in cat

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Happy the Cat Left the Earth

Happy got to experience rain, sunshine, and moonlight on the weekend he died. I spent all day Sunday with him, carrying him around and petting his beautiful black fur with its thick, light gray undercoat, and white spots on the neck and belly. Coincidentally it was the day Catholics dedicate to their cat saint, so when I lay in bed petting my napping kitty and checked social media there were an unusually large number of cat related posts. I spent a lot of my time speaking softly to Happy. I also internally spoke with Freya. She told me I couldn’t save him, and that she would welcome him to her field and her home.

That evening, he was in my bed and meowed for me to do something. I was not sure what. I carried him to his water; he didn’t want water. I carried him to his food; he didn’t want food. I carried him onto the back porch. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the moon. The white spot on his belly nearly glowed in the moonlight. I let him sit in the moonlight and checked back on him later, and discovered he had made it back inside the cat door by himself, and camped just inside the flap. When I picked him up I noticed the tip of his tail was wet. He got to trail his tail in the pool one last time, which he loved to do. He had made it all the way out to the pool deck and back, but now he was ready to be carried again. I put him back in my bed and curled up around him. I petted him and we fell asleep. He died in the morning before I woke up.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Minoan Cat: cute, stealthy, beloved

I've written before about the dogs the Minoans kept as pets and hunting companions. But did you know the Minoans also had cats? They probably came to Crete on trading ships from Egypt, and it's clear from the art that they loved their kitties every bit as much as modern people do.

That's a Minoan cat up top in a fresco from Hagia Triada. In true cat fashion, it's hiding behind some ivy to sneak up on a bird.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Wish Cat and the snowfall

About a week after my housemate wished for her own cat, this cat appeared. When I first saw him he was on the front walkway, and I snapped this photo thinking he would probably walk away after that. Nope. He walked right into the house and made himself at home. 

This is amazing because my cat Happy usually runs off any other cats that enter his territory. He usually hides from strange people and dogs, too. Anything rat-sized is dinner, of course. But Happy tolerated this new cat. He only got hissy when the new cat jumped up on the bed where Happy and I were sleeping. Otherwise he was remarkably laid-back about the whole other cat thing. It's like magic. It IS magic. Freya magic.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 42 Manx Cat Colors & Patterns (with Pictures) - Excited Cats

Simmy was a one-person cat, and I was it. She was also an adept of the astral.

When I won a scholarship to study in the Middle East, she disappeared for the entire time that I was gone. Oh, my housemates could tell that she was still around: the litter box was used, the food bowl emptied. But see her, they didn't.

Simmy, you see, was Busy.

She was my first cat, a petite brown tabby Manx with a stumpy little tail. (One of her nicknames was Bunny Butt.) Like most Manx, she was a powerful jumper. When bats would get into the house—a perennial problem wherever witches live—she would jump for them as they wheeled around the room, and never failed to catch them out of midair.

I'd been gone for about a month when one morning I dreamed that Simmy was sitting on the foot of my bed in my room in Jerusalem. I very much had the impression that while her body was laying inert in one of her secret hiding places, her soul had out been roaming the world in search of her Human. Found me she finally had, after a month of searching.

But that didn't mean that she wasn't pissed. She was sitting on the bed with her back to me.

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She is my sweet tuxedo cat :B : aww

 

Interspecies communication has always fascinated me. Miss Squeak was a past master of the art.

She learned early on how to get exactly what she wanted from human beings. When she was young and lived in the country, she led an indoor-outdoor life.

If it so happened that she arrived back home late at night after the doors were already closed, no matter. She'd climb the big old blue spruce next to the house and hop off onto the roof. Then she'd sit outside the bedroom window and cry until they opened the window to let her in.

What Miss Squeak wanted, Miss Squeak got.

Later in life, she came to live with me in the city.

One day I took a workman down into the basement to do some updates on the water meter. Unbeknownst to us, Miss Squeak followed us down.

I heard the story later. While working on the meter, he was puzzled by an incessant series of sharp, demanding cries from elsewhere in the basement.

Following the cries to their source, he found a little black-and-white kitty sitting on the laundry room floor in front of the closed door that led to the stairs. Miss Squeak never did like closed doors.

Mind you, if she'd just wanted to get back upstairs, she could have gone up by the same way that we came down; that door to the stairs still stood wide open.

But, of course, mere access was never the point. There must be a lot of satisfaction in getting the big, dumb animals around you to do precisely what you want.

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  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    Mr. Posch, Thanks for sharing! We have an older female cat reminiscent of Miss Squeak. My wife informed me that our male cat rec

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Miss Squeak grew up in a house of many cats, and all of them picked on her. When she first came to live with me, you could see the incredulity on her face: You mean I can just lay down anywhere, and nobody will try to jump me?

With such a background, Squeak didn't like to be held. That was OK with me; she was plenty affectionate in other ways.

Then, about a year and a half ago, as I was laying on my bed one day, reading—the sleep hygienists all say you shouldn't, I know—she hopped up on the bed and stretched out on my chest.

Here I am, she said, looking me in the eye.

And that was that. Since then, she's even taken to climbing up on my lap, the ultimate act of feline trust: Squeak, the cat that didn't like to be held.

On her last night, when I got home from work I found that she'd curled up on the pillow on my bed. Well, everyone has the right to die where they want to.

Although by that point moving was difficult for her, when I woke in the middle of the night I found that she had crawled under the covers and snugged up to me: the primal mammalian comfort of skin-to-skin contact that, in the end, is maybe the best giving that we have to offer one another.

So the cat that everyone picked on managed to find a territory of her own, and someone to snug up to. There are worse lives to be had.

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  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    awwww kitttyyyyyy

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Mom and the Neighborhood Bengal

The last time my mom ever sat on the back porch, enjoying the sunshine, she said she wanted to have her ashes scattered by the cat graves so she could see Beni one more time after she dies. A few minutes later, she saw him. Or at least, she saw a cat that looked like him.

Mom had just switched from oncology care to hospice care. She had previously said she wanted her ashes scattered other places, including a specific park in Sonoma where we used to live, and a park here in Henderson with a memorial tree, and the redwoods in California, and up on Mt. Charleston. She was looking at the part of the yard we call the Shadow Garden, after the first cat buried there, when she made this statement, so I wasn't sure if it might just be a passing fancy. But I was sure she really wanted to see Beni-Wan Cat-Obi again, another of the cats buried there. She often said he had been her favorite cat.

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