Hello, Cute Kitty

There was a half-grown kitten in the middle of a pot of impatiens outside my sliding glass windows the other morning.

I didn’t notice him right away. The large black cat pacing majestically by the window caught my attention first. This full grown male was surveying the territory as the lord of the manor might. He stopped and looked over his shoulder briefly and then strode on, out of my sight.

And at that moment I saw the kitten, sitting tall and compact, like an Egyptian god, looking down from his meager height and thinking “I’m invisible.”

The retirement community where I live has a lot of feral cats making their homes here. They like it here because they are well fed and mostly left alone. Some residents complain about them, especially those who accuse them of cutting down on the bird population.

But there are a lot more old women – and maybe an old man or two – who feed them and give them pet names.

But mostly they don’t ever get to pet them, to scratch behind their ears or under their chins, or hold them their furry little bodies on their laps and listen to them purr.

I don’t feed this really cute little kitten. My next door neighbor does. She has since the momma cat appeared at her window with two quite small balls of yellow/orange fur. These two are on their own now. But they know where food is to be found.

The darker one likes my potted plants. I’ve seen him often in another pot that has taller plants in it – I forget the name, dusty miller, I think. Anyway, he sits looking out through the stems.

The impatiens, however, are in a pot on top of another, large Chinese pot turned upside down. It is a more exposed, but higher perch.

I don’t even know if he is a him, but I think he is. His sibling, I think, is a girl. She’s more dainty, less adventuresome. But just as pretty.

I miss my Murphy. She moved in here with me four and a half years ago. We were both old and not too spry. But she must have been older in cat years because she dies almost two years ago

She was a rescue cat and I never knew how old she was. It didn’t matter. She didn’t know how old I was, either.

We just found each other.

I wooed her with food and quiet conversation from a distance. She had not grown up feral and eventually she approached me. I remember the day she let me touch her, the day she decided to jump into my lap, the night it was going to freeze and I asked her if she wanted to come in and she did.

She slept on top of me after that – until I got too hot and made her get off. Then she spelt next to me.

But I had two rooms then and my bathroom was large enough for a litter box. I have one room now and a smaller bathroom. And I can’t bend down to clean a litter box if I had room for one.

So I admire and enjoy watching our untouchable felines. Occasionally I sigh.