Tiger, Tiger

I was going to call this post "Petting a Wild Pussy", but images of scores of angry Google Pervs storming my gates and demanding satisfaction thundered through my head and I thought better of it.

The last of this years batch of feral kittens is still hanging about. Probably because I'm feeding her. Funny how that works.

She is grey with tabby stripes, and in a fit of originality, I have dubber her Tiger. I don't know where I come up with these names, either.

When she's eating, I can pick her up and hold her for a bit. She'll even purr and cuddle a little before she remembers she's supposed to be wild and demand to be put down so she can continue the important business of devouring whatever cat food was cheap at the market this week.

She hunts rodents and birds, I hunt bargains. She eats whatever we catch.

Yesterday morning, I set some oatmeal to cooking and thought I'd go outside for a moment, enjoy a little of the morning and take some photos of the broom I decorated for my door but can't hang on the door because the summer sun turned the space between the door and the storm door into a furnace (I don't have a screen door - I had a screen door but it was rather mangled in a tragic door-removal incident that I'm still too traumatized to talk about) and melted my hangy-thingie, so I hung the broom from the flag holder that has no flag, because obviously.

As an aside - I would dearly love to have a screen door and to replace my metal front door (Seriously, who puts a metal door on a house in the Southeastern US? On a wall that gets 27 hours of sun a day? And the sun is about six inches from the door the whole time? Someone who wants to watch callers burst into flames when they knock, is who) with a wooden door...and even better, a wooden Dutch door. Sigh.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

So anyway, today when I went outside, Tiger ran up to greet me as she usually does, by standing a few feet away and meowing, working up her nerve to get closer, then run past me up the stairs and around the empty bowl, telling me how wonderful I am until I feed her, shying away from my hand if I try to pet her before she'd had a bite or ten.

Yesterday, though, something was different.

Tiger let me pet her. Without picking her up first. And she came back for more. And she was purring!

Look (try to pretend that's not the biggest, most deformed hand you've ever seen in your life):



Yep. I have a way with pussies.

I was so enraptured by my little friend, I burned the oatmeal.

I ate it anyway.