Going though my photo archives trying to size up what I have of Claudia.   Given that she’d only appeared on my front porch back in April and I only had her officially for five weeks, I didn’t expect to find much.   But there’s quite a bit there, because almost as soon as she started making herself at home here at Casa del Garrett, I started snapping off shots with the iPhone because it was handy.   The tragedy of getting yourself too involved in photography as an artistic pursuit is everything you do with your cameras becomes a part of that and just documenting your day to day life falls through the cracks.   She was this amazing new thing that came into my life…completely unexpected…and eventually I did start focusing the good cameras on her.   But in the randomness of it all I am so grateful now for that cell phone camera: it was always on my hip.

This was taken during one of her initial explorations of Casa del Garrett. I don’t think at this point I even knew whose cat she was, just that she was a neighborhood domestic cat who probably belonged to someone else and was constantly, and to my delight, confusing my house for theirs, so I kept letting her in.   Here she’s wandering around in my upstairs bedroom while I sat by the door just watching her explore.   As she came back over to me I reached for the iPhone and turned on the camera app and then with the phone in the left hand I reached around to give her a scratch with the other.   The expression on her face is typical. She was never hesitant or wary around me…never.   And that was the most amazing thing because I was at this point, still a total stranger.   However it is cats size people up, she’d somehow taken my measure that first time she bolted into the house, and proceeded to make herself at home. It was as if she’d known me, somehow, forever.

And I didn’t want a pet, and there she was, and there I was and it made prefect sense and I didn’t want it to. All my cast iron resolution that the last cat I’d had back in the 1980s was it after I came home one day and he was dead…no more pets.   I had a ton of objectively sound reasons why a pet just didn’t fit into my life and that little dickens blew past all of them as fast as she’d bolted into the house that first time I laid eyes on her, when I opened my front door one April morning and she’s there on the front porch sitting quietly looking at me as if to say “Well finally you opened that damn thing.”