How It Started

Ten years ago I was a person who owned a nice couch and had never once considered the tensile strength of a screen door. Then a gray cat with one crooked ear appeared behind my apartment building during a thunderstorm, looked directly at me, and made a decision on my behalf.

I named her Gravy. I do not remember deciding to name her Gravy. The name simply arrived, the way weather arrives. Gravy moved in that night and, four years later, so did the couch’s replacement, because the original did not survive the negotiation process.

Enter, Sally

Sally arrived two years later, handed off by a foster network at 2 a.m. because her previous foster had, and I quote, “run out of ideas.” She was seven weeks old, weighed about as much as a dinner roll, and immediately climbed the curtains to establish territorial dominance over a household she had lived in for eleven minutes.

She has never come down from the curtains, metaphorically speaking. She has strong opinions about sunbeams, closed doors, and the injustice of the sixty dollar bed. This blog exists because she has a great deal to say and no thumbs with which to say it.

Fostering, or How I Ran Out of Furniture

Somewhere between Gravy and Sally, fostering happened. It happens to a lot of us. You take one kitten “just for a weekend” and five years later you have a laminated feeding schedule taped to the fridge and a spare room the humans are no longer permitted to use.

I’ve fostered eighteen cats and kittens through a local rescue network, mostly bottle babies and the medically inconvenient, the ones nobody wants to gamble on. Every single one has gone on to a home, which is either a testament to good adoption counseling or proof that people cannot resist a cat who has personally inconvenienced them.

Working With the Professionals

I work alongside a couple of local adoption agencies now, mostly doing the unglamorous parts: intake photos, foster matching, the occasional home visit where I pretend to know things about cat-proofing that I learned the hard way and am now passing off as expertise.

It is slow, unpaid, occasionally heartbreaking work, and I would not trade it for anything, mostly because Sally would never let me hear the end of it.

Why This Blog Exists

Cats have opinions about everything and no outlet for them. Sally has opinions about the sun, the door, the bed, the box the bed came in, and the general competence of the household staff. This blog is her outlet, and I am, functionally, her transcriptionist.

If it also happens to nudge a few readers toward fostering, adopting, or simply respecting a closed door’s right to exist, that’s a bonus. Sally would say it’s the least the internet could do for her.