Fellow Travelers

Back in March, we adopted a little black cat from PAWS. It was somewhat abrupt—I'd been vaguely looking but hadn't been too serious about the whole thing because I wasn't sure that Squidling could handle actually living with a cat even though he's quite good with my mom's cat and the neighborhood cats—but the minute I saw the listing for the long-haired black senior cat who was used to living with kids and was described as having impeccable litter box habits, I thought she might stick.

When we went to meet her at PAWS and, the minute one of us put our hand in her cage, she rammed her head into it and started purring, I knew it had to happen.

Her original name was Bellatrix, which we shortened to Bella, and Squidling gave her the new full name of Bluebell to finish the transition. She's been a completely different experience both from the dog (she fits soooo much better in our lives than the dog did, thank heavens) and from my past cats.

Theoden, for those who didn't know him, was a doofy marshmallow himbo of a buff/tan cat—big, generally confident, and completely helpless at anything and everything except yelling at people to do things for him. Random, meanwhile, was a beautiful little blue-eyed murderbeast who would snuggle so hard it was like he wanted to be inside you, then turn around and bite and bunny-kick you for literally no reason (and I say this as a person with lots of cat experience—I never could figure out what triggered Random most of the time, he'd just suddenly decide he was Done With You).

Bella... is a lady. She is seven years old (not the ten that was originally quoted to us, at least not by the vet's estimate and her very nice teeth), and about eight pounds soaking wet, and has very particular opinions about many things. Her litter box habits truly are exactly as impeccable as advertised, and while she will make her wishes known if her food bowl is empty, she never gobbles. She eats delicately, and walks away a few times before coming back to a meal later.

She's also the first cat I've ever had who cares about when people go to bed. And, as it turns out, she cares very much about that. A few weeks after joining our household, Bella determined what the "correct" bedtime was for my husband and I, and she now holds us to it with an iron paw, herding us upstairs to bed and supervising all bedtime-adjacent activities to make sure we get properly settled before retiring to her favorite comfy chair or to explore back downstairs, herself. She also supervises story time during Squidling's bedtime routine, just to make sure we're doing things right.

It's delightful to have a cat in the house again, and it fills a hole that I'd probably left empty too long.