Lessons My Cat Has Taught Me
She’s smarter than she looks
About five years ago, I was gearing up to begin my senior year of college. I had just signed a lease on a five-bedroom house with my boyfriend at the time and three of our friends. We attended a small school with a rather limited amount of off-campus rentals available, so we already knew the house’s previous occupants who were about to graduate and hand off the place to us.
During the transition, I was chatting with one of the women who was moving out about the house and what she liked about it. One reason she was sad to go, she said, was that the housemates had just discovered a cat living under the front porch!
“He’s kind of shy, but he did let me pick him up,” she told me. “We named him Francis.”
As someone who has been preparing since childhood to evolve into the quintessential “cat lady” stereotype, I was thrilled. The house in which I was going to be living included a built-in cat, and I hadn’t even planned on it. As soon as we moved in, I set up bowls of water and cat food on the porch, and waited impatiently for Francis to make his appearance.
