The Cats of Summer

'I'm eating for god's sake!'

 I woke this morning with a memory of my Great Aunts Margaret and Eleanor. They were my grandfather’s sisters. One was a high school math teacher and, I believe, the other taught high school science. One in Troy, New York, the other in Schenectady, New York. The precise combination, who taught what/where, utterly escapes me. Of course. Toadstools have better memories than me.

They lived up on the hill in Hoosick Falls, New York and had a giant boat of a car. It was a bright, almost glittering, tan-ish color. Behind their handsome Victorian home was a small barn --  a carriage house really. You know the type -- in cities they're converted into charming, madly sweet, posh, insanely expensive dwellings. Envy!

'You don't want any of this, do you?'

They could have used it as a garage for that champagne QE2 of a car. Instead, it was their feral cat house. Eleanor and Margaret gave food and shelter to the neighborhood’s stray kitties. Hell, it was probably the entire small town’s population of otherwise homeless felines.

I remember, on a visit when I was no more than ten, Margaret let me accompany her as she prepped and then brought dinner out to the herd. After pouring piles of kibble in a few giant silver colored, metal mixing bowls we paraded out to the ‘barn.’ While I held the bowls, she used all her strength to pull open the huge, heavy sliding doors. Inside was the most wondrous and magical of sights -- throngs, legions, a seemingly infinite number of cats.

Hot Princess

Heaven! Seriously. I wanted to move in. Given how often we moved, my father’s allergies and my mother’s loathing of all four footeds, we never had cats. Aunt Margaret opened a door to a spectacularly beautiful universe.

Rocco in his Summer Palace

So, you see then, this Host to Feral Cats Far and Wide title, my mission to feed gypsy or otherwise homeless felines is encoded into the strands of my DNA.

So what’s up now at Bob and Donna’s Valhalla Café? Greta and Gaston aren’t squabbling quite as much though at least some of that is, possibly, due to her arriving later in the morning -- presumably to duck our operatic boy. Rocco, the old man of the mob, spends most afternoons lounging and scowling on our rickety back porch -- his Summer Palace.

Our beautiful Coco? Like me, she just can’t abide the heat and divides her time between the front window seat (where she can keep a close watch on the neighborhood doings and catch a breeze) and laying under the ceiling fans, waiting for me to bring her lemonade and popsicles.

Poor dears.