I was lying on the couch the other night when Sal assumed her usual position, nestling in the crook of my bent knees.
Dean curled up a few feet away, establishing her independence, yet still relishing the warmth of our closeness on the couch.
The three of us sat there for a while, me lightly scratching Sal behind the ears (she loves that!). I got to thinking how enriched my evening was just by the mere presence of these two cats.
As I wrote a while ago, our first encounters weren’t exactly smooth. Back then they were my husband’s angsty 2-year-old cats, and I was moving in on their territory, stealing their man. But as we really got to know each other, we developed an inseparable bond. They’re now my best friends!
Sal wiggled around by my feet, changing position so that she was perched on my thigh facing me, paws dangling over the tops as if she were sitting at a desk. I looked at her earnest little face and realized that my first meeting with them wasn’t really the beginning of our story together. It actually began one New Year’s Eve over 6 years ago, when my husband met these tiny little kittens for the first time.
I realized I’d never asked him about the specifics of this first meeting. He told me the story later that night.
He recalled that about six and a half years ago, he was a bachelor living alone in a large city apartment. He wanted the companionship of a pet, but his job at a local newspaper didn’t afford him the time needed to take care of a dog. He decided he wanted to adopt a cat instead, and wrote about his experiences trying to find one in a newspaper article.
A friend of ours, Stacey, read his piece in the paper and contacted him. She was a social worker with a client who had just been hospitalized after adopting two kittens. Rather than take them to an animal shelter on behalf of her client, she asked my husband if he wanted to take them in. Though he had only planned on one cat, he said he didn’t have the heart to separate the two baby sisters.
On New Year’s Eve 2004, he drove over to Stacey’s house to meet little Sal and Dean, who at that point were only about a month old. He walked in the door and there they were! Tiny little things that fit into the palm of his hand! It was love at first meow…er…sight!
“Meet your new kittens!” Stacey said, handing him a new carrier.
He took them home that night and rang in the new year with them curled up in his lap. The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s hard for me to imagine them as tiny kittens, as I knew them only when they were grown. But at moments like those when my husband or I can just lie with them on the couch for hours, enjoying each others’ company, I realize it doesn’t matter. Cats live in the moment…and mine inspire me to do the same!
—Jessica Bloustein
Do your cats enrich your lives in simple and wonderful ways? We’d love to know all about how they do! Email us at lovedemcats@guideposts.org.
