I never planned to have six cats in my household. The most I’ve had before now was four, and that was by accidental circumstances. But lets start at the beginning of this tale and document how I got to where I am today.

Back in late 2007 my oldest daughter came back home for a while, and brought two cats along with her named Ellipse and Lulu. Ellipse was a Norwegian forest cat who was first owned by a math student (my daughter was in the same college at the time), and that’s how she got her name. The shelter documented the name and my daughter kept it, preferring to call her Lipsie.

The second cat, Lulu, was a gray mackerel tabby that was found as a feral kitten lost on a roadway. Lulu kept some of that feral fight in her, up until the day she died. She could at times be quite the hell cat.

And then, in 2008, a third cat literally walked in through my front door and adopted me. We eventually named her Lucy, which I documented here ( /2015/06/18/remembering-lucy-moments/ ). Over time I fell in love with Lucy, to the point that it was quite the emotional blow when she passed in 2015 (to be honest I grieve all the little ones who pass on). The surprise for me with Lucy was how sharply I felt the loss, even more surprising because I wasn’t a so-called cat person before this. I certainly tolerated Lipsie and Lulu, and cared for them with plenty of food and vet care, but I wasn’t as in to cats as I was into Labrador Retrievers, of which my wife and I have owned continuously since 1979. Lucy was with us eight years, and that eight years transformed me.

So when Lucy had to leave me in 2015, along with Max, it hit hard. As the saying goes you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, and that saying certainly applied to Lucy.

It hurt so bad at the time in part due to the fact I had to put both Max, our yellow Lab at the time, as well as Lucy to sleep at the vets; Max due to old age and Lucy due to end-stage feline cancer. That was the middle of 2015.

Meanwhile, as fate would have it, a cat named Sunshine belonging to a friend of my girls needed a new home, so my oldest daughter agreed to take her in. Sunshine was dropped off at our vet to have her checked out, and the vet discovered she was going to have a litter of kittens. Sunshine delivered five around the first of October, three female calicoes and two male gingers. The calicoes were quickly spoken for, but the boys were having a hard time being placed.

As I’ve written before I commented I’d take the boys if no-one spoke up for them, thinking that the boys would find adopters. Surprisingly enough they didn’t, so I did.

We reached a point where Lulu, then Ellipse, passed over the rainbow bridge and I was left with the boys. One evening my wife was reading an article in Love Meow about a rescued mother cat (Joan) and her four kittens, two of which were Danï and Zoë. They were at that time being cared for by The Runaways Animal Rescue out of Port Richey, Florida. One thing led to another and before I knew it we’d driven over and picked up the two kittens.

We were carefully raising the new little girls when we started to read that their mother, Joan, was having a hard time being placed herself. So we said we’d take her, thinking that mom would like to be back with at least two daughters. That didn’t quite work out, but after a while everybody at least tolerated everybody else.

Finally, Nicholas showed up at the shelter as a lost kitten in pretty bad shape; he wound up losing his left eye to infection. Again, the call went out to anyone who might want a one-eyed cat. For whatever reason I took an almost immediate shine to the little guy. The rescue named him Gumball, but we named him Nicholas Joseph Purry after the MCU character Nicholas Joseph Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) because he was missing the same eye, and if you watched the Marvel movie Captain Marvel then you know it was a Ginger that basically took out Fury’s left eye.

Back to the original question: why all the cats? Because all of them needed to be rescued, and I’ve a soft spot for hardship cases. Life is short and harsh for feral cats. Second, because of all the sweetness they bring to the household. Finally, I’ve unlearned a lot of bad “facts” about cats by raising everybody over the last 15 years. I do not claim to be a cat expert, but I’ve grown far more knowledgeable over the years of how to successfully live with cats. All of them, without exception, are sweet and loving little creatures. They demand so little, yet give so much kindness and love.

Finally, a quirk that neither The Runaways nor I can explain; all four cats from that side of Florida are polydactyl cats. For me that makes them even more special, and another reason to have them around. Sorta like Hemingway.