Ness, an adopted light tan, male tabby cat came to live with us when he was around 1-3 years of age. We felt he was young, as he was very frisky and mischievous. Offbeat behavior dealing with food and water developed right away. Whenever Ness wanted to eat, he would “meow” at one of us humans until we stopped what we were doing and walked him to his food dish. The odd thing being that he didn’t care whether or not that person stayed while he ate; it was as though he just wanted someone to escort him to his food.

Eventually, we noticed that the water in his water dish was receding very slowly, if at all. The goofy cat wasn’t drinking out of it. Instead, we had observed him hopping up on the kitchen counter in order to drink out of my husband’s water glass - mine was always ignored (Ness isn’t too fond of human females for some reason). To counter this behavior, it became a daily ritual to put my husband’s used glass on the floor. And, yes, the water would disappear.

Becoming acquainted with his surroundings, Ness spent more and more time outside. As the days passed, we discovered that his schedule changed with the seasons. Wintertime, he would spend as much time inside as possible. He did not like the wind nor the cold. Summertime, he was an outside cat, particularly in the evening hours. He became quite the hunter, staying out all night to snag his prey. His spring and fall schedule was flexible.

One spring morning, as my husband let Ness into the house after being outside all night, he spied something small and ‘suspicious looking’ on the front porch. It was too small to be a rodent and upon closer examination, it turned out to be a segment of what used to be a mouse. Apparently this was not a tasty morsel as this particular parcel, (and sometimes more than one) would appear on the ’sacrificial altar’ each morning thereafter. It became a daily chore to pick up after the nightly hunt.

As with anything that is repeated frequently, there comes that day when procrastination rears its ugly head and one inevitably gets an unexpected visitor at the same time. Yes, that is exactly what happened. Of course there were multiple ‘presents’ on the altar that day. Fortunately this visitor was a cat lover. His first question to me was, “Do you have a cat?” After I said, “Yes”, he said, “I thought I recognized the signs!” That incident was sufficient motivation for daily maintenance of the front porch!