I usually peer in the window, then wander off. It’s safer that way. But I was spotted and invited in, so I took a chance.
It feels like speed dating – is that still a thing? – where you rush in and meet everybody with at most a couple minutes to grasp each personality before moving onto the next. It’s not as structured, it just seems pointless to backtrack if your first impression is that you won’t click. Or that the rest of the household won’t click.
My girls have fairly aggressive personalities. They’re not outright hostile, simply a handful, and I won’t subject a timid personality to that. I’m also not sure how they’d react if I brought someone new home. We walked out of PetSmart without adopting another cat.
It’s been over two years since we lost our third cat, Mungojerrie, at the ripe old age of 19. Well, our first cat really, since he was the oldest. I adopted him at 10 weeks old, along with his brother, Rumpelteazer. (Yes, they lived up to their names.) We had lost Rumpel to cancer eight years before. At the time, we had a third cat, Missy, who almost became friends with Mungo before she passed away. When we lost her, he was lonely, howling for attention in the middle of the night until we (quickly) conceded and adopted Diane, our beautiful black and white cat.
A few months later, we had a brief, and tragic, interlude with Marianna, a cat who gave the most wonderful hugs, but didn’t absorb salt properly into her system. This caused her to pursue odd food sources, including climbing into a garbage can for some French fries that had been thrown out. She was a strange one.
After losing her, we adopted June, our polydactyl tortoise shell (she’s a Hemingway cat… an extra toe on each front paw). She was a young mother, being adopted out at the same time as her “kittens” (they were as large as her already, and she’s not particularly small), and she rounded out the family perfectly.
This was the first time since we Mungo passed away that I’ve stepped into the room to meet the adoptable cats. I’m not sure we need a third cat, or that we’re ready for one, but there was a cute Siamese I wanted to meet. As it turns out, he was sweet, but too shy for this house. Maybe next time.
