Cats

Now and again the cat, nearly fourteen years old now, has to remind me that the Internet overlords require cat pictures with some frequency, with more frequency than I do them. And that she is ready for her close-up now.

Minnie is fourteen years old, getting up in age, but she still pays attention.

I don't know this cat. I mean, we haven't met properly. When I looked down from the gallery outside our kitchen, he seemed pretty suspicious of me. But he sat for his portrait nonetheless. It was getting dark already and he had positioned himself for a good view of the birds we had been feeding above him, and perhaps for other more terrestrial wildlife as well. I wish him well in the latter. Fifteen minutes later, it was dark enough that I couldn't see whether he was still there or not.

I took several pictures of this cat, belonging to friends of mine, in 1997. She liked lying flat like this. Kodak T400CN (a b&w C-41 film) in my Nikon FE.

I don't think we are any different from most cat owners, wondering what she's thinking when she stares at us. A friend of mine, also an owner of cats, suggested it is foolish trying to figure out "what passes for thought in a brain the size of a large walnut." He's probably right. She's fourteen years old and knows her way around her human beings. She's pretty, too.

In this morning's brilliant sunlight, Minnie lay down on her latest bit of cardboard to contemplate how long she would keep up the social distance from her humans.

Blue was an old cat, already 22 years old, when I took this picture of him in late 2003. He had just come back from his veterinarian's. He lived another two years after this picture. Fuji NPS160 film in Rollei 35TE.

She was watching me going downstairs. She was looking through the rails.

Well, we, the humans, were waiting for supper. She, the cat, couldn't understand why we weren't outside the door with her.

She's nearly fifteen years old and doesn't like too many changes, like when we close the little door to the basement (so she won't eat the plants temporarily down there, sheltering from the storm that passed through a couple of days ago).

I was tying my shoes readying to leave. She came out to see me off but didn't want to look me in the eye.

Today I went out to do a couple of things in the driveway. This cat was sitting there as I went out, and still when I came back in. He was sitting on the grass staring under our front porch. There is a very small space there and juncos fly into it, presumably to rest or perhaps to nest. It is far too small for the cat to get in. But he was very much taken by the phenomenon, unaware that the juncos were able to leave on the other side.

We were enjoying the salt air for a few days. And Minnie enjoyed it too.

Two days ago it was cool enough to have a fire and the cat agreed. Yesterday it went up to thirty degrees.

Minnie was outside with us in the heat of the late afternoon. She's not much of a hot weather cat. She went back inside a few minutes after this.

The puss doesn't like the weather: seven degrees and still raining. It's been like it for days and days.

Our next-door neighbours got a new cat a year or two ago and, I think without knowing the name of our cat, called her Minnie. So we have to distinguish by saying "Your Minnie" instead of just Minnie. Their Minnie sometimes watches the birds (and when I'm there, me) from a big window she sits in. Today I was watering plants on our deck when I realised she was watching me. So I photographed her.

The Other Minnie, the next-door cat, lounging today, watching the chickadee show beneath her.