I thought I told you, in the past, all I could about Cleo and about cats that hang around my house in general. Not so. Yesterday I faced an entirely new dilemma. It was a situation I had not expected.
Cleo likes to go out to play. Often. She is a house cat but in good weather outside is where she wants to be. That’s OK. Children and small, young animals love the outdoors.
Cleo had been off somewhere in the front yard or in the field next to the house. I noticed she had come home. She was on the front porch. I could see her out the sliding glass door because my desk and my word processor table faces the window in my bedroom where I do all my writing.
This was strange. She lay at the edge of the porch just looking in 10 feet away. She never does that. Normally, she lets me know she wants in and she wants some kitty bits or some petting. Cleo uses telepathy and pantomime to tell me that by placing her nose at the door opening and staring in at me. Now she lay there unmoving.
“What was keeping her there?” I wondered.
Then I saw the reason. Pressed up against the glass was Calico, a stray cat, which I had been feeding for several months. Calico came from the field one day last year and stayed on. Once upon a time this Calico was a neighbor’s cat. When my neighbor died her cats went wild, I think. Calico, a young female, had the notch in her ear to show she had been fixed,
I fed her every day and even made a house for her on the porch. It was complete with a door opening in the cardboard and the bottom was padded with rags for a soft bed. Despite Calico’s gyrations when she sees me as she lies on her back and looks at me piteously begging to come into my house, I think, I have resisted her protestations of undying obedience and affection. I have never let Calico in my room because one house cat is all I can handle, what with shots and flee power and such.
Lately I had noticed Calico began to hang around most if the time looking as if she wanted to come in to my house … like Cleo. I shooed her away, of course. This day, Calico had made up her mind that the next cat to enter my domicile and take up residence would be herself and not Cleo. She was guarding my door against Cleo and preventing her from entering. Calico had finally put her cleverly conceived plan, to usurp Cleo’s place in my home and in my affections, into execution.
I believe in loyalty. I am loyal to friends like Cleo. No matter how much Calico might connive, cajole and calculate to replace Cleo, that was not to be. I had to shoo Calico from her perch at the door so Cleo would see the way was clear and she was still welcome. I did. Cleo, like a shot, streaked into the room.
Once inside and with no Calico at the door, she was especially affectionate. Up to my computer table she jumped and lay on the keyboard pushing her nose against my arm. She was relieved, I suppose, that I recognized she was still my cat. I also realized I would have to watch these two critters more closely.
Who knows, since I am such an easy touch, and if I become sure the two cats can get along together without fighting, perhaps, someday in the future, I might be persuaded into deciding there was room for two cats in my home.
