In memory of Smudge.
I got thinking about dear Smudge by mentioning her in another thread and the circumstance of her arriving on my doorstep keeps replaying in my mind. So this is in memory of a sweet natured cat.
It was a bitterly cold January night and my hubby had taken me out to a retirement meal for one of my work collegues. He had gone to visit one of his friends and picked me up and we went home. When we arrived, there was a small black and white cat sitting in our porch. On the gatepost nearby was a large ginger cat. Inside (we lived in a cottage then and the front door opened straight into the living room) was our resident cat Merlin. Would there be a fight? It was so cold and late that we opened the door to fate and the little cat went straight in. We were concerned for the cat on the gatepost but he did not move. In fact, he stayed on that gate post for 24 hours - it seemed to us that he was on guard until we had asked about and found no one claiming the little cat as theirs and made the decision that she could stay! Then he vanished and was never seen again (imagine spooky music here please!). Smudge stayed with us from that night in 1987 until we had to have her pts on 23/09/05. She presented us with 3 lovely kittens in the spring. They were all various b&w patterns, but as little kits they did seem to have stripes under the dominant b&w! Your guess is as good as mine! My only wish is that we had had a digital camera before she died and of course they hadn't been invented when she arrived.
A maternal uncle (my mother's family were all cat crazy) told me he had never gone out looking for a cat - they always found him and he had lived in various places all over the world, never without a cat.