The Continuing Story of Star and Lovey

Not long ago they were strangers. Now they are inseparable.



The setting needs a little explanation: The living room of our home is separated by a glass sliding door from a glassed-in back porch. Beyond the porch is the screened pool area separated from the porch by sliding glass doors and a cat door. Although we eat lunch on the porch and swim in the pool, that area is the Kingdom of Cats. There they roam, eat, sleep, and have their litter boxes.

Once there were four felines in the Kingdom of Cats. When only Lovey remained, Star, five weeks old and motherless, was brought to be his companion. She had to live and grow mainly in my computer room for two weeks, gradually being introduced to Lovey and the rest of the house.

As you can see from previously posted pictures, once she and Lovey became friends their favorite sports became “Peekaboo” and “Ambush” under and around the striped sheet draped over the lounge chair on the porch. It soon came to pass that Lovey would be sitting on the porch side of the glass door at dawn, waiting for Star to be let out. Sometimes he wailed. Star would station herself on the living room side of the door. Star would mew for Lovey when she saw him through the glass. When the door was opened, “Peekaboo,” “Ambush” and wrestling instantly began and might continue for a couple of hours nonstop.



Star seems to grow in sections. First she suddenly got higher off the ground as her legs became longer. Then she seemed to gain about an inch in length overnight. Then it was the turn of her legs again. In the time she’s been here she has doubled in size and weight (almost 2 pounds now) and has progressively manifested cat behavior which no one taught her: From running and biting and wanting to be held all the time to leaping sidewise, arching her back, batting things around the floor and off my desk. The desire to climb everything became more and more obvious, and then jumping -- leaping longer and longer distances, until within the past 48 hours she has jumped onto things and off of things that were previously way beyond her range. No table top is safe now. Lovey no longer has high refuges from which to look down on her. Star simply jumps and scrambles until she is beside him, no matter where he goes.

Only very recently did she begin to clean and groom herself as adult cats do – licking her paws and washing her face. I suppose that until now the mother cat would have done the kitten-cleaning jobs, but now, at eight weeks, Star is becoming independent. Bets are being placed as to how soon she’ll overcome the last obstacle to freedom – discovering and learning to use the cat door which leads from the porch to the pool deck. She has been on the pool deck and has explored the potted plants, but only if the sliding door is opened. Her obsession with the water has, hopefully, been dampened since her precarious explorations of the deck’s edge led to her rear legs dropping momentarily into the pool.



Star has, for the first time, spent the last two nights on the porch with Lovey instead of shut in the house. They’re both very happy about that. It didn’t take her long to get into his food and his litter box and prove she was old enough to handle both, and so today my room ceased being a nursery and became my den and computer room again as Star’s things were placed on the porch and a major cleaning took place. Star still comes into the house when she pleases, taking naps on a Julia’s recliner in the living room or playing on the shiny kitchen floor, but she is moving more and more toward a life on the porch and pool deck with Lovey.

Here are a few choice pictures of the little beauty taken by Julia Lee, copyright 2007.




The Art Critic



Those toes are made for bitin'
And that's just what I'll do.
One of these days those toes
Are gonna come right offa' you!






All photographs copyrighted 2007 by Julia Lee, who also wrote the toe-biting song.