Laurie White’s Blog

So, I woke up, early (still getting over the effects of travel to Europe and realizing I’ll be getting up early for the next 2 weeks, so why bother sleeping late) and wandered to the living room, passing the glass doors to the back porch.

And the porch was full of kittens.

Well, not actually full. There was still a grill and lawn chairs and such, but there were actually 4 kittens playing on the porch. And since they were healthy kittens, they filled the porch, bouncing and climbing and killing acorns and such.

But I was awake enough to realize that, as adorable as they may be, kittens don’t really belong on the back porch.

Ike was with me and shared my kitten consternation. He just crouched and stared at them. And, since neither of us knew what to make of a porch full of kittens, we decided to bring Charlie into the mix. He’s been able to sleep later and is heading for the west coast today, where he’ll sleep later still. But he made the mistake of muttering something as I was leaving bed, so I figured he was awake.

And there were kittens on the back porch.

Sure enough, this wasn’t some sort of strange hallucination. Charlie agreed, once he woke up enough, that there were in fact kittens on the back porch.

So, the three of us watched the kittens and mama cat (who had had enough of the kittens to spend the time on the porch railing, above the fray). Three of the kittens were colored like their mother,
mostly white with a few large black or gray patches. But one was the spitting image of Ike. I really had to wonder if he had figured out a way to get out of the house to go catting around. (But our vet is too good; I’m sure it wasn’t Ike’s progeny.)

Random kittens on the back porch are a magical way to start the day. In fact, This American Life reported on the attempts to create a tv channel of puppies, because watching puppies is so good for the soul.

But, after a while, you start to wonder how the kittens got there and are they abandoned and what do we do with them and were they born in the yard and what are kittens doing on the back porch?  The mother didn’t look familiar so we thought maybe the family had gotten dumped, but they seemed exceptionally healthy and happy.  After a while, they proved to us they could slip through the barricade that we put in to keep Linus on the porch and disappeared.

And that’s how the day started out.  With a bit of magic in the morning.