Snapshot Saturday

[afterallthistime]

In the summer on 1998, a small cat - not kitten - appeared on the second-story porch of my parents house. We couldn't tell its age or its gender (look, it was a stray, so we weren't about to go "poking around;" and without investigating, a long-haired female and a neutered male don't look too different, quite frankly), and we could only assume that it wound up on our porch after some impressive acrobatic involving an adjacent tree (unless, as my brother suggested at the time, it was deposited there by a particularly strong gust of wind). Over time, "it" became "she," and "she" became "Jade." Jade spent most of her time outside, though in the worst of the weather (and in New England, we get it all) we'd let her in to sleep in the hallway or in the attic. When our tenants moved out of the apartment below us, Jade was often its sole occupant in the interim; even though we've had tenants down there consistently for eleven years now, she's never broken the habit to sneaking in whenever the door is left slightly ajar).

Thirteen years on, Jade still spends winters and the hotter days of summer in my parents' hallway; she still sleeps in the attic and hunts, often leaving little "presents" outside the door. She still scares the hell out of all the other cats int he neighborhood, and can still hold her own in a fight. Overall, I'm still impressed by how self-sufficient she is, given how old she must be (as I said, she was not a kitten in 1998), though there are moments when I notice that she's getting thin, or slower than she was, or - as she does in this picture - just looks so much smaller than she used to.