When I moved in with my friend Molly, her husband, four kids, three dogs and three cats, I had no idea how everything would work out for me. I wasn’t that big on kids, but I’d always loved cats in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that my mother hated them.

Cat Lady, by Kim Slone, 2016

If you had asked me two years ago, “Katie, would you ever have a cat?” I probably would have laughed. Now, I have two. Two beautiful golden nuggets of joy that I simply cannot get enough of. Every morning I wake up to their purrrrs and every night I fall asleep to their cuddles. I’m sure everyone says this about their own pets, but I believe I have the most amazing cats in the world. I am officially a crazy cat lady at the age of 30.

When a parent dies your world is turned upside down. That is what happened to me when my dad passed. He had been sick for a while and I helped him with his final arrangements. We cleared out the furniture and the belongings. It was a trying time for him, my sisters and myself. At the same time, we had to place my mother in a care facility to help with her Alzheimer’s.

Let me take you back to April 2014 – to a time when my then tween was fishing excitedly even though there was not a drop of water in sight and certainly no fish.

When I was a child we had a few cats, and despite loving them all as members of the family we weren’t keen on getting any more after they passed away naturally. It’s true that we shed a good few tears, though we still remained adamant that we would never get another cat. Unfortunately we had a cat who piddled on furniture in the house and another who was uncontrollably having litters of kitten constantly, of which were very hard to sell to loving homes. Both of those cats mentioned would also hunt wildlife and we often entered our house to see feathers all over the place!

The Yoda: He Puts the Cat in CATitude

It was my sixteenth birthday.

Cats have been an important part of human society for a long time, acting as pest control and cuddly companions for millennia. It seems only natural, then, that they appear in folklore and mythology around the world, sometimes as heroes, sometimes as villains, and sometimes as just straight-up oddities. Which makes sense, since most cats I know regularly cycle through these three states of being in any given day.

I first met this gorgeous cat back in the summer of 2017. My family had just moved into a new house and this cat appeared through the hedge and greeted us with a small "meow". After owning a cat when I was younger, I was happy knowing our new home had a feline friend in the area.

Our son Kirin decided that he wanted a dog. My wife Carol, his other mother, decided that he needed two white gerbils and a black cat. Galileo, aka, Gally was found at a shelter in Fredericksburg, Virginia.