Confessions of The Cat Lady (1)

My mother was born in 1907 on Breakwater Avenue, Pigeon Cove, in a little house that was swept away in the Blizzard of '78. My great-grandparents the Areys would watch, from Phillips Avenue, the fishing schooners returning from the Grand Banks.



At home on Halibut Point, 1952
Mom, my sister Jane, and our 1941 Dodge

I was born in 1929. I always liked cats. Once my aunt's poor old grey mother cat had some kittens. One of them, Stripey, came over and looked up at me. When I picked him up and petted him he started to purr. I was gone for him. That was my first step down the Primrose Path. I was probably seven or eight years old.

I'd played with kittens before. But there was something about this little guy. He was a pale gray tiger. He had a horrible life later. All kinds of things happened to him. He lost an eye. He hurt his leg. I thought he disappeared. Then about two years later I heard something at the door. I opened the door. There he was.

Stripey had a bad life. My father was not good to him, for one thing. Stripey sat under the neighbor's bird feeder. They told him to get lost and complained to my father about it. Cats don't get it at all that they're being punished for something they did yesterday. My father - my mother should have stopped him - took the cat by the tail and swung him around and around and let him fly. He called it the Airplane Whirl.

When did the cats really start? I'd been living on Halibut Point quite a while. I started feeding the wild ones when my parents were still alive. That would have been in the late '80s, early '90s. Some of them did become tame. The last one I had, Devil Cat I called her, because she and her siblings were running around doing fresh little kitten things. I said, "That's a little devil." Devil had beautiful long, long orange fur. A sweet, laid-back cat, really.

And so was Buzzy, white with long hair. He came up the steps, as a half-grown kitten, and looked in the door. I didn't trust him to do that. Once in awhile if they got in they'd go crazy. They'd climb the walls, they'd climb the hutch full of dishes. They'd throw themselves at the windows. They felt trapped. It's hard to get them between you and the open door to get them out without the rest of them coming in.

He was definitely a feral cat. He looked at me and I looked at him. I said, "Buzzy, would you like to go in?" I took a chance on him. He was only about this big. He said, "Oh yes," he wanted to go in. He walked in, he walked around, he didn't go crazy. There was tuna, and a can of milk on the kitchen floor. He ate that. He had a little nap on the couch. Then he got up and he said, "Okay, I want to go out again." He did that all the time I had him. He was an in-and-out cat.

"Little Mutt acting snooty on the rose trellis, July 1955"

My neighbors the Vierecks had cats. I called one of them Muffer Paws. She had big fluffy paws. Then there was Circe, who looked like a Siamese. Well, it may have been a sacred cat of Burma. She was random-born, a random-bred cat. Of course she was a beautiful cat, and she was sweet and nice, and popular with everybody who came to visit. Then there was Cecil, a big strapping tiger with white trim.

Some of them used to walk down to the shore with us, down the trail to the Reservation when we first moved there. Some of them would hide in the bushes, wait until the others came back, and jump out at them. Sometimes we met dogs. That didn't go well. The dogs chased the cats and I'd yell at the dogs and the dog people would yell at me. That's just regular stuff. The dogs couldn't find the cats in the bushes. They didn't even want to, I think. Cats are good at disappearing into the bushes. Better than dogs, probably.

The cats do quite well but they usually have to have some kind of sponsor like me. I put a lot of work into those darn cats. I was the Cat Lady of Halibut Point. There must have been fifty to sixty over the years. Some were pet cats. Some were so-so. Some never got tamed. They were beautiful cats. They weren't scrawny or nasty-looking things. They had beautiful, beautiful coats. I fed them well.