Simon on the fence.
For most of my life, I’ve been a cat magnet. I haven’t had to look for cats. They’ve come to me. They’ve walked up to the doors of successive student apartments and refused to leave. They’ve followed me into elevators at my office building. They’ve been left behind at houses I’ve moved into.
I’ve loved and cared for every cat I’ve adopted, for the remainder of its life. Some of them lived to be quite ancient: two were over nineteen years old at their last parting.
I did go looking for this cat.
I adopted Simon from the Louisville Metro animal shelter this February, when he was about ten months old. The shelter’s efficient volunteers were pleased and surprised to hear that I’d driven to Louisville specifically to see this cat, whose picture a friend had posted on Facebook. The shelter workers said that black cats were hard to place. People associate them with bad luck or witches, or they want cats with showy coloring.
This cat had been at the shelter since he was only a few weeks old. His adoption fee had been reduced by half. In addition to his coloring, his habit of carrying his tail crooked at the end or bent over his back worked against him. (There’s nothing wrong with his tail; the unusual carriage results from a harmless genetic trait).
Simon with aerial tail. Sometimes he carries it almost flat along his back.
He’d obviously been very well cared for at the shelter. Although he was sleek, well socialized, and well fed, Simon was soft-bodied and a bit awkward when I brought him home. His assignment was to learn to be an indoor/outdoor cat, and to deter mouse invasions of the house and barn.
At first, he clearly had no idea what to do. Being outside astonished and cowed him. He proved to have a brave and adaptable nature, though, and soon, his catly instincts took over.
Now, it’s hard to persuade him to come in at night. I insist on it, to protect him from owls and coyotes, though his black coloring is protective in his current circumstances.
He’s become a fine mouser.
And he has shown great tolerance for the three small dogs who already lived here when he arrived. If they annoy him, he stays just out of reach, or climbs up on something. They remain eternally hopeful that they can eventually catch him, or fly or disappear as he seems to them to be able to do. I’ve never seen him hiss at them, or arch his back, or show them his claws. I think he finds them comical.
Over the months, he’s become slimmer and more athletic than he was when he lived at the shelter. Although it’s a beautiful facility, with spacious exercise areas for the animals, farm life necessarily offers a wider range.
It’s been a pleasure to watch this beautiful cat come into his own.
