I Live With A Cat

I live with a cat. Her name is Mrs. Hudson.

She is not my housekeeper.

I might be hers, though. Housekeeper, servant, devoted slave. Something.

Mrs. Hudson came into my life about a year and a half ago. I found her in a small cage in the humane society.

Okay, my mum found her.

I was there to see a different cat, one that caught my eye in the pictures of her on the humane society’s website. I went to see her and found, rather sadly, that she was most definitely not the cat for me.

Some cats aren’t, you know.

But my mum, not one to give up as easily as that, walked around and found another cat that she liked very much. We sat with her for a few minutes while she loudly proclaimed her displeasure at our interference in her daily life, and decided that yes, this was the perfect cat for me.

I, too, dislike having my daily life disturbed.

Since then, Mrs. Hudson and I have gotten very close. She is something of an old lady, already ten years old, and—well—a bit crotchety. She sleeps on my couch, eats too much food, runs from one end of my small house to the other when she is excited or frightened, leaves dead mice in the middle of my floor, and throws up in my hallway when she is deeply displeased with me. She scolds me when I come home late from

work, refuses to eat the human food I drop on the floor, (because really, what do I think she is, a dog?) sneaks outside when I leave the door open—even though she has no claws and would last .2 minutes on her own—and wakes me up in the middle of the night to inform me that the fire in my wood stove has gone out, and we are both about to freeze to death if I do not get up right this moment and do something about it.

I love her so much.