To all the kitties I've loved before / by Beth Winegarner

I’ve lived with cats for most of my four-plus decades on this planet, and I’d like to introduce you to (most of) them.

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This is Tommy. It was taken in the first few weeks after I was born; my mom was feeding me and Tommy decided to get in on the snuggling. He looks pretty pleased with himself.

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Cricket. We got Cricket and her brother, Fred, from Amir, our neighborhood mechanic after his cat had a litter of kittens. Fred died a few years after we got him, but Cricket was my heart-kitty through most of my adolescence and early adulthood. She was such a sweetie, and loved snuggling and sleeping in with me on the weekends.

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This is Sunshine. It’s hard to tell from this picture, but she was a long-haired tortie cat (with the attitude to match). When we adopted her I wanted to name her Panther, but my parents overruled me. She was born with a tail, but had a habit of sitting in the street with her tail jutting into it, and we think she got it run over by a car — she came back to the house with a dislocated and fractured tail. The vet amputated it and she quickly learned how to balance without it.

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Here’s Macaroon. He and his brother Willie came to us from our neighbors, Arrow and Rio (that’s their house on the other side of the fence in the background). He was a sweet and very social cat who grew very round in his later years. He loved hanging out with people, even people he hadn’t met before, and his meow was more of a quack.

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And here’s Willie. I don’t have many pictures of him; he also died pretty young. He’s still a kitten in this picture, and he’s inspecting the fish tank close-up. (I love that this photo also features my brother, my encyclopedias, my Garfield and Duran Duran posters, and my Singer Featherweight sewing machine.)

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Meet Emerald. We adopted him and his brother, Merlin, from Eric, my boyfriend at the time. Merlin ran away to live with another household in the neighborhood but Emerald stuck around. He preferred hunting for his food (birds, mice, etc.) over eating the food we provided him, and had a corner of the yard where he would store leftover critter parts, sorted by type: feet, beaks, wings, and so on. He also really enjoyed “helping” my mom make quilts.

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Later in life, Macaroon and Emerald bonded with each other. They slept curled up together a lot of the time, and Macaroon would give Emerald extensive baths. They really loved each other and it was so sweet.

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This is Mouse. She was my partner’s cat for the first few years, but lived with both of us after we moved in together in 2001. Even though she was part of a litter of mixed-coloration kittens, she came out looking like a French Chartreux. She was beautiful and smart — she learned a bunch of facial expressions from us, which was pretty funny. Despite being a bit antisocial, she loved laying on my pregnant belly and was gentle with our kiddo as a baby and toddler.

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And here’s Pigeon. We adopted her from the SF SPCA about six years ago, when she was a brand-new and recently spayed mama. Her belly was shaved and stitched up, and her nipples were still full of milk. She was very skinny and her coat was scraggly and she farted every time she jumped onto or off of something. We soon discovered she has a lot of sensitivities and allergies, got her onto some more appropriate food, and she began to look and smell a lot better. She’s not a terribly smart cat, she’s quite anxious and she has asthma, but she’s also a total love.