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Spoiler: this is sad, but don't worry, the kitten is ok and so is my adult cat. I started writing this post when I was feeling ecstatic over adopting a new kitten. I'll leave what I wrote unedited and then there will be more under the heading THE REST OF THE STORY

Storm the kitten. Also called Stormy, Stormy Kitty, Kitten of Mass Destruction, Entbane, Breaker of Trees. Yes, as soon as he was named, he lived up to his name by breaking a tree. A little one. The mimosa tree seedling I wrote about on this blog, sadly. My second chance seedling. All the mimosa tree seedlings are gone now. I spoke with the gnome and the tree about it and plan to give away seeds when they are ready this winter.

I don't know about all of you, but I have had many black cats in my life. The last one who was a furry family member lasted to the ripe old age of 22! Bootsie was a sweetheart—so gentle, so loving—a true gift to be a part of of our lives for so long. Many times when we adopt a pet, it is believed that they choose us, as much as we choose them. I believe that to be true.

Feline Friendships

That certainly has been the case for my dear longtime friend, Mary Domhan. If anyone is a cat whisperer, she's the one. She has the power to tame ferals, and cats always seem to find her. In my Halloween podcast episode (number 36) for "Women Who Howl at the Moon," I talk to her at length about her artwork and new Edgy Cat Designs website. If you are a lover of all things feline, you will delight in the cards, art prints, and stickers she has a available. If you're shopping for a cat lover friend, I have no doubt you will find it at her website!

"Isn't two years an awfully long time for a cat to be at a shelter without being 'adopted'?" I ask.

My question seems to nonplus the director.

"There's nothing wrong with her," she hastens to assure me, misreading my question.

I hadn't really thought that there was; actually, I was just curious.

It's been three years now since Squeak the Fearless died, in the autumn of the first covid year, and it's time: a house needs a cat.

Besides, witches love the anomalous. With my special affinity for Manx—the stubby-tailed ("stumpies") and tailless ("rumpies") cats of the Isle of Witches—Bunny would have to be a drooling psycho-kitty for me not to like her.

All is explained when we enter the cat room.

Immediately, I'm engulfed in a rising tide of cats: cats rubbing against my ankles, cats head-butting me; cats making nice.

Meanwhile, alone in the center of the room, identified by her eponymous gray stumpy tail, lies Miss Bunny: dignified, aloof. I think of aloof's original meaning: facing into the wind.

Well, there's all the explanation those two years will ever need. Ain't that just like life? The friendly (read: needy) ones always get 'adopted' first.

Ugh. Dogs trapped in the bodies of cats, I call them. Independence requires boundaries. Give me aloof any day of the lunar month.

I crouch and extend a finger. Bunny sniffs at it delicately, then permits me to stroke her fur and rub her ears. She does not get up. Not unfriendly: just a cat with a life very much her own.

Take a close look at the controversial Green “Man” on the official invitation to Charlie III's upcoming coronation—the one that has occasioned so much brujaja in the British press.

Note, gentle reader, that it is not in fact a Green Man at all, but rather a Green Cat.

Green Beasts

In fact, the Green Feline is a not infrequent variant in the Leaf Mask motif, which turns up, historically speaking, relatively early in the development of the motif: during the early Romanesque period, in fact.

You can generally distinguish them from Green Men by their cleft lips, and the pointed ears on the tops of their heads. Art historian Tina Negus, attempting accommodation, refers to them as Green Beasts rather than Green Cats, but in fact almost all known examples are readily identifiable as felines rather than some other sort of beast.

So: if you're going to have a Green Beast, why a cat rather than some other sort of animal?

Myself, I suspect two reasons: one historical, one, well...what Nanny Ogg would call persychological.

Cats or Lions?

First off...which are we actually seeing here: Green Lions or Green Cats?

Um...Reply hazy, try again later.

For the time being, let's go with the neutral term, Green Felines. Later on, we'll see why the royal Lion would be the preferable reading.

Practical Cats

To this question, my friend and colleague Frebur Moore suggested a practical answer: that—felines being predators—what we see in the Green Feline is the hidden, stalking beast, peering, as it were, through foliage.

Makes sense. But wait, there's more.

Eyes Front

It's clear that the first foliate masks were human faces. This, I suspect, is yet another reason why Green Beasts tend to be Green Felines.

Felines, being predators, have their eyes on the front of their heads rather than on the sides. This makes their faces more visually similar to human faces and hence, more readily adaptable as stand-ins for the human face than those of animals—herbivores, say—with eyes to the sides of the head instead.

Yet another reason why cats are better than dogs.

But the Real Reason...

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.

A friend's friend has been having trouble with her cat. She'll be petting him, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, he lunges and bites her viciously.

“She's been trying pheromone therapy,” my friend tells me, rolling her eyes. “I keep telling her that some cats just don't want to be petted, that some cats can only put up with handling for so long; but she just doesn't want to hear it.”

“People,” I commiserate. “An animal is a partnership. It isn't a thing, subject to your wants and whims: it's a living being, with a life and a mind of its own.”

She sighs and shakes her head. What I've just said is so obvious that it shouldn't even need to be put into words. There's a pause as we both consider the implications of this.

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.