October is National Black Cat Awareness Month* and last Saturday (aka Caturday) to promote the cause, I shared a photo on several Facebook pages dedicated to black cats of my black cat rescue, Shadow, with the brief caption, “Celebrate! The Beautiful Black Cat.” The picture was simple – a closeup of him with an uncluttered, softened background, with my equally simple call to action in the text of the post: “October is Black Cat Awareness Month, so let’s celebrate this Caturday by sharing the awesomeness of black cats with pictures of your beauties today! This lovely model is our rescue, Shadow, who showed up at our doorstep about a year ago.” Read more

For Mia and me, our happiest moments are those that are also the quietest.

I love all my cats, each for their wonderfully distinct personalities, but I share a special affinity for my sweet Mia, a cat who most vividly mirrors me if I were a cat and she a human. We both have our moments of strength and boldness, but for the most part, we are introverts at heart, rather unbothered by our frequent desire for peace and solitude. Read more

In this current COVID era in which time doesn’t seem to evolve, but drifts endlessly from one day to the next with nary a distinction between what day of the week it is, let alone what month, the same does not hold with my beloved senior cat, Zee. With him, I’m painstakingly conscious of every fast-paced tick of the clock that passes within this slow-motion world. Read more

Happy Birthday to a very special and extraordinary cat.

I’m nearly 60 years old and cats have been a part of my life all of those years, probably totaling at least a couple dozen during that timeframe. And I love them all – past and present – each with their wonderfully unique personalities. I won’t say I have favorites, that’s not my style, but I can say every once in a while one of them really stands out, having an extraordinarily special nature. Kizmet is one of those cats. He’s a cat in which the earth revolves on a very special axis – one that is exceptionally kind, tolerant, intuitive, loving, patient, and accepting. In other words, he’s what’s good and pure about this world and a cat we could learn from. Read more

There are a couple of facts when it comes to cats – one being, unfortunately, that there are millions of them at any given moment living in shelters in need of a good home, and two, that it’s been proven cats can decrease our depression, stress and anxiety levels, lower our blood pressure, and decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke by having them around. With our current COVID-19 landscape, defined by stress and anxiety, and June Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, it seems the purr-fect time to bring that feline shelter companion to your life and household. Save a cat’s life and they save yours. Seems fair to me. Read more