… but enough about me

Since a friend of ours asked us to watch her cat Xena for her, I have felt like I’m cheating on my cat. Xena is really a standard, black, short-hair domestic cat. Nothing special. A dime a dozen. But like any ordinary mistress, she is completely enchanting.

Her eyes are gorgeous — smoldering dark amber coals against night-colored fur. My cat is colored like a holstein.

Xena is thin and sleek, nearly weightless. She moves like a shadow. Mukau is obese and graceless; grunting comically with every leap of her corpulence.

I fed Xena a quarter of a can of cat food and gave her a bowl half full of dry food yesterday, and this morning the canned was gone and the dry was hardly touched. This morning, when I fed Mukau half of her normal serving of dry food, she wolfed it down, turned toward the oriental rug and vomited it all back up. Each nugget was intact. She had not even bothered to chew.

And yet, Mukau is very soft and warm. She is large enough to wrap herself around you, and it’s lovely when she does. She is sweet and quiet. She sleeps with me, on top of the covers, in the valley between my knees. Sometimes if she catches me on my back, she’ll crawl onto my chest and wheeze softly into my face until I fall asleep. And though she is just using me for ambient body heat, she certainly does a lot of it and seems to enjoy it. She is good company.

I guess the grass is always Xena on the other side, right? But I’ll take Mukau. My dalliance with Xena ends tomorrow. Suppose Mukau can smell another cat on me. And suppose she forgives me. If she can forgive me, I think I owe her the generosity of my full attention. Funny that she’s the house cat, and I’m the one to stray.