{"id":8005,"date":"2014-11-16T20:41:31","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T01:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=8005"},"modified":"2014-11-16T20:58:05","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T01:58:05","slug":"neighborhood-calico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/8005","title":{"rendered":"Neighborhood Calico"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I keep forgetting I can take video now with this little pocket device I&#8217;ve been carrying around for years. It&#8217;s the still photographer I am. I forget that pictures can move too, if the occasion presents. So the little feral calico cat that&#8217;s made herself something of a home around Casa del Garrett has become friendly enough toward me now that she&#8217;ll come to greet my car when I return home. Yesterday it was after a trip to the grocery. She&#8217;s four, maybe five years old now, which is so I&#8217;m told about as long as outdoor cats live and it&#8217;s getting on toward the winter cold, and I&#8217;m starting to worry about how much longer I&#8217;ll have her in my world. So I&#8217;ve started recording some moments with her&#8230;something now I deeply regret not doing with Claudia&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/J_HvjM816ug\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Toward the end of the video I have a geezer moment and I get the term &#8220;tabby cat&#8221; confused with &#8220;tom cat&#8221;. Her dad, obviously, was a tom cat. One of her parents was a tabby.<\/p>\n<p>I started feeding her two hurricanes ago, after I saw her huddled in one of my basement window sills in a torrent of cold driving rain. I knew I didn&#8217;t dare go out to try to coax her somewhere dryer because she&#8217;d just run off and I was afraid I&#8217;d find her dead there in the window sill the next morning. But next morning she was gone. I put a dish of tuna on the window sill and when I checked it later it was empty. I&#8217;d deliberately used a very visually distinctive old Fiestaware bowl, and the next time I saw her I put some more tuna in it and walked out on my porch with it and held it up so she could see it. She seemed to recognise it, and I put it down and went back inside and watched from the front window. She came up and chowed down. I knew I was making a commitment then, but she&#8217;d been hanging out on my street for about two years by then and I was getting attached. This was before Claudia.  <\/p>\n<p>Later that day, while I was doing some lawn work by the front steps, I saw her come over and sit down on the sidewalk about five yards away from where I was, and she gave me a long level stare like I&#8217;d never seen a cat do before. I thought, <em>I&#8217;m being sized up<\/em>. Then she walked off.<\/p>\n<p>After that, my feeding her became a thing. Later my neighbors on either side got into it too. One even built a small winter shelter for her out of one of those big plastic storage containers. So she knows she this side of the street is a safe space.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve no idea how much longer she&#8217;ll be with us. Five years is a long time for a feral. But she won&#8217;t be coaxed inside..at least not for more than a few seconds. I&#8217;ve gotten her to peek inside the house maybe three times and it&#8217;s never for more than a few seconds and she bolts out again. You can&#8217;t get too close. She&#8217;ll come sniff my shoes and that&#8217;s about it. But I got her to trust me and that&#8217;s happiness enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I keep forgetting I can take video now with this little pocket device I&#8217;ve been carrying around for years. It&#8217;s the still photographer I am. I forget that pictures can move too, if the occasion presents. So the little feral calico cat that&#8217;s made herself something of a home around Casa del Garrett has become [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[145,149,153],"class_list":["post-8005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-a-life","tag-casa-del-garrett","tag-cats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}