Miscellaneous cat in Dublin, Ireland.

My cat Maddie, looking adorable.

I am inordinately fond of cats.

Since early childhood, I have been very much a cat person, and that love of cats is strongly attached to my desire to forge a concept of place. When I was a child, as I mentioned in my previous blog post about my concept of place, a lot of things changed in my life and I really had a tendancy to latch on to things that provided me with a feeling of consistency. When my mother and I adopted our first cat, Sassy (a boy cat unfortunately named by the very young me after a girl cat in the movie Homeward Bound), we had previously owned a few other animals that, unfortunately, had died. The ranks of the deceased had recently come to include a beagle, Brownie, who had been put down after attacking and hospitalizing an elderly caretaker while we were away, and a stuffed surrogate dog puppet I had named the same that I found out the hard way had been infested by wasps.

Sassy hay became a constant in my life and, as my mother and I began moving from place to place again, he became a marker that I could look for when I wanted to find the place I belonged. Because of this association with belonging and with home, I have come to my inordinate fondness of cats, and I always feel a pang of nostalgia and belonging when I see one. It helps that cats, when of the friendly inclination, don’t seem to care where a person is from or what language they speak as long as that person is willing to give them pets. It’s as if they were designed by nature to communicate to strangers’ “here, even here, you can find a way to belong.”