This thread makes me smile and also to miss yet again my two very old kitties who departed the planet last spring and early summer. Not quite ready to hit up the shelter yet, but I know that's an option that will slowly become desire.
I did notice the other day though that the screen at bottom of my deck door has become detached from the gasketing along half the bottom and up a foot or so on one side. So, I may have a porch cat who hasn't quite introduced himself or herself yet, perhaps still scouting to see if there's any competition. Or, just one of those cats that adopts four or five unsuspecting "owners" and circulates among them picking out a great place to snooze, the best place for breakfast, the most fun person to play with and the one that feeds birds in winter...
My previous porch kitty is my avatar. She was one of those multi-owner managers.
At the time she showed up, she couldn't come indoors here, since I had the two kitties who owned the inside of this place until they passed away at age 22 and 20 last year. She showed up during a February blizzard in 2004 by belly-swimming through snowdrifts from the road and punching a hole in that deck screen door... and yowling for breakfast after she parked herself on the table out there.
I was hooked, of course. She did become my "breakfast kitty"... I put on gloves and stuffed her hissing and yowling into a cat carrier and hauled her off to the vet for vaccinations and then called her mine but I was hers, basically. Porch Kitty was a joy for three and and a half years. She was killed (slowly) by someone who shot at her with a pellet gun. She managed to crawl back here somehow, and I felt so honored that she made the effort. When the vet and I decided she could not recover from the muscle damage, organ damage and shock, she was helped across that rainbow bridge... and she finally became an indoor kitty; her ashes reside in a little carved box in one of my bookshelves.
Here she is on a spring snooze one forenoon before her usual disappearance to check out her other property holdings in the area.
She was apparently quite the brawler in defending her right to occupy whatever were her various turf claims, but so sweet and affectionate with me as time went on (after eight months of not trusting me and hissing at me even as I set food dishes out for her on "her" deck table). No one can take away my memory of our times together.
