Remembering Cats

Recently, I’ve been going through some old photos.

Not old family photos made 100 years ago; these are more recent, and they’re of the cats I used to live with, the cats I think of as family members. Four-legged, furry, meowing, purring, playful, lazy, clingy but pretending they weren’t, daring, adorable…

You know, cats.

Let me tell you about some of them.

This is Kes (sorry about the blurry photo; it’s a scanned analog photo, there were no digital cameras back then): he spent 13 years with us before he disappeared. He was daring, never giving up, playful, and wonderful. Lady cats loved him, and his voice was unbelievably gentle when meowing at them; you wouldn’t believe that a male cat could meow like that. When it came to the other males, though, it was a completely different story. And a completely different voice.

This is Srećko; his name translates to Lucky. He was an indoor-outdoor cat, like Kes. Cuddly when he wanted to be, and then going out, invading another tom’s balcony, and quarreling with him, loudly, when he complained. And then coming back home to enjoy himself in a safe and warm place.

This is Micko; a common name for a male cat over here. One day, Lucky brought him home, and then kept bringing him home until he accepted to stay. It’s a bit unusual for a cat to do that, but, hey, we couldn’t refuse to take him in. So we had two male cats for a while, and they got along great.

Here they are together. They died within 3 weeks of each other; both got hit by a car.

This is Srećkica (it translates to Lucky Girl). She was a stray kitten with an eye infection my mother found after the guys above died. The vet took care of the infection, and, with what happened to Lucky and Micko, Lucky Girl is strictly an indoor cat.

Lucky Girl is 9 now, with a tiny indoor kingdom of her own. The cat on the photo within the photo is Wingnut (Wingnut and her human have been sending photos for Christmas all over the world, as a part of the Operation Spread Warm Fuzzies), and if the couch behind the kitties looks like generations of cats have been sharpening their claws on it… Well, they have. And they have turned it into the best kind of couch.

Because cats make everything better.