Because We Need the Supervision

We’ve been adopted by a cat.  I’m sure she has an actual home somewhere in the vicinity where attentive residents actually feed her and provide water and toys and more proximate affection, but for whatever reason she has decided that we need watching over.  Almost constantly.  Day and night.  We are just as likely to find her nestled into the bare dirt in the chicken yard, as camouflaged in the tall grasses at the edge of the prairie, or curled around the flowerpot on the old oak stump beside the barn.  Early on in her supervisions I worried over the chickens, thinking that the cat had nutritional designs on the birds, and I would shoo her away.  But over the months of her visitations I’ve relaxed my concerns.  She may have her eyes open for the mice that routinely pirate the chicken feed - and I welcome that - but she has made no move on the hens.

 

I refer to her using the feminine gender not because I’m privy to any special discernment regarding her nature, but because I can’t bring myself to refer to the creature as “it” – a pronoun too static and inanimate to apply to a being so lithe and vibrant, so attentively aware and so clearly animated; and for some ineffable reason she simply strikes me as a “she.”  Incongruently, I’ve fallen into calling her “Casper,” even though I know that the “friendly ghost” of my childhood cartoons was a boy.  It doesn’t seem all that incongruous, however, given the androgenous nature of the ghost, and the white, almost apparitional nature of the cat.  

 

The dogs will see her through the window, in daylight or darkness, luminously traversing the driveway, from hither to non, presumably altering her angle of vision.  They will bark as she passes, but she seems untroubled by their perturbations as if knowing that they represent no threat behind the glass.  Usually, however, she simply appears – silently, elegantly, watchfully.  At various times throughout the day or evening I’ll go out to fill the feeders or gather the eggs or close the coop doors and there she will be.  Verbally and physically laconic, if such a thing is possible.  She watches me, keeping her distance.  If I violate it in the course of my ministrations she will saunter off to a more comfortable remove, recommencing her observations once I’ve absented myself. I’ve noticed, however, that she is gradually becoming more forgiving of my intrusions, less troubled it seems by my passages and more prone to hold her position.  

 

We aren’t cat persons, so I won’t speculate on her intentions.  As I hinted, she receives from us no food or affection, nor does she solicit such benefactions.  In fact, as the weeks have passed and I have grown more accustomed to her manifestations, I have come to see her presence more as an offering than a seeking.  She asks for nothing, so far as I can tell; she simply offers the gift – the soulful wisdom - of her supervision.  

 

And given the thinness of our comprehension of all that surrounds us here, never mind our age or tenure on this small piece of land, she seems to recognize that we need it.