At Home With Cats

Young Franklin

This site is all about cats, getting them adopted, showing their beauty and their expressive beguiling ways, their stories, their lives with humans who are making homes, homes and families that include cats. And mostly, the cats who weave themselves throughout those human homes and hearts. That’s my focus, though there is sometimes a little about us, the humans: our lives, my art and art I like, our surroundings, and our wish to preserve the natural world and its cats. Always, the cats are along with us.

Still using past pictures due to computer stuff, we don’t work fast around here . . .

Stripey with a smile

Any place I’ve ever lived, cats seem to already be there, or to show up, or to live around us, somewhere nearby. That’s true of any place humans have settled. Cats do cluster near people. Even unfriendly ferals appear to gravitate towards people, they keep their distance but if they always stayed hidden away we wouldn’t be aware of so many feral colonies. Like the ones we saw years ago on our way to an out-of-town doctor’s appointment, eating, being fed and maintained by the employees of a quick mart in a dent in a forest off a highway.

Well-fed stray cats

Did those ferals come from deep in that forest or originally from distant houses? Sometimes terrible people drive cats out in the countryside and dump them, but those cats almost always try to make their way back to locations with humans. Even those who were born feral outside make their way to homes. They might be drawn by the odors of food, which are apparent to them over much longer distances than they are to us, and by other cats as potential mates, but between a choice of total wilderness hiding and playing “now you see me now you don’t” with scary tall beings, in my experience they choose us, humans, most of the time. Of course, just as they did at our historic beginnings with cats, they also come in pursuit of any rodents who may still have designs on human food supplies.

Lovely Moonpie stretches

During our life with cats, most came directly to the door or to the doors of friends who placed them with us. We arranged for those cats to join us and be in our care. Wait, how much did we arrange, or did they come to us seeking, or already knowing? The feral cat mom (now spayed) who won’t come anywhere near us except for food, was she wise, looking out for the future for her kittens . . . or do I imagine that?

Spooky and Boss

Spooky says, “Protect me, big brother, but keep your large rear end out of my foot space.”

I hope to advocate for kitties through my work and my book, to showcase the delights of living with cats, and help increase adoptions. I have a rare and limiting chronic illness (it’s more or less stable right now), and I could never have made it this far without the cats. I am so grateful for those readers who understand that our “cat purpose” and our “cats in homes” purpose is what matters here at this site. I regret that being limited, I can’t get out and about on the cat blogosphere as much as I would like to.

Lynx is grand!

When writing I think like rolling prose-poems, though here I often chop up the sentences to be more modern, to be absolutely “clear”. I halfway “go with the flow” of present day . . . When I was young we were reading “stream of consciousness” works. We were reading beat poetry in snack bars and “coffee houses” in makeshift spaces, and reading all those old British poets and playwrights in classes. So I’m part “old school” or should I say, “old library”?

Spooky Girl Next to Stripey

Boss as the day fades

In those days we were hearing and making prose poetry in parks, where we saw people giving away kittens, and we learned that we were there to take those kittens and go make homes, and to find the moms and the elders and make sure they were in homes too. Homes that can happen deep in a forest as ours did, or way up in skyscrapers in busy cities, or in pleasant suburbia, wherever. Homes where the cats keep coming around just to see what’s going on . . . what’s cooking . . . And we were meant to keep on taking those kittens, those young cats, those older cats into our homes and families, and we did, cats who padded into the home, and then infiltrated the poetry whenever we took up writing again.

Shelley the Show-Off, Our Friend’s Cat

All our household cats came direct from neighborhoods, streets . . . although some prior cats in my Muse Award winning book, Catwoods, traveled through forests to get to remote houses. The book went through rewrites but retains writing styles that are either quirky or polished, according to the decades it describes . . . I wanted it to be conversational, using cadence and expressions of humans actually talking; I wanted it to be rhythmic, with beats, like music. But mostly I wanted it to be about cats, to help cats, and to help us care for cats! Links to the book are at the upper right-hand side and on the page under the banner, “Order the Muse Award winning book online”.

Cheers and Meows until next time!