2 Cats

Our animal family currently includes ten cats, none of whom we actually planned to acquire! Our oldest cat, Hazel, simply showed up at our back door one day. Aslan, Otsu and Tamika, a brother and two sisters, were tiny orphaned kittens living in a patch of weeds next to a busy road. We caught them, one by one, with a live trap we borrowed from the local humane society. We found Isis, a beautiful black cat, abandoned with her four littermates along a wooded country road not far from our farm. Since we already had nine cats, we kept Isis and found good homes for the other kittens. We picked up Leo, a black-and-white cat with long, silky hair, and Sabrina, a pretty gray tabby with golden eyes, as half-grown kittens along roads in our area. When we lived in Texas, my son, Nathaniel, found our other gray tabby, Sherpa, when she was a tiny kitten; she was wandering in and out of cages where stray dogs were held by the county. Delta, a young gray cat with white markings, showed up thin and hungry on our Kentucky farm one winter. She is now quite plump! Hester, a long-haired gray cat, lived in the crawl space beneath a restaurant. She was skinny and her hair full of tangles. Today she is a pretty cat who keeps herself very well groomed. I have enjoyed not only helping these cats, but getting to know them as distinct personalities.