If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now by Christopher Ingraham

Author:Christopher Ingraham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Back to that first summer. One of the visitors to our home was a poofy long-haired orange cat. It showed up in the yard one day, got chased up a tree by Tiber, and yowled until I came over to rescue it. It followed me around for the rest of the day, and subsequently started coming over to visit every day.

The cat was extremely friendly and appeared to be fairly healthy, so it was evidently being cared for by someone. But nobody in the neighborhood seemed to know who. Jason Brumwell remarked that it had often sat at the bus stop with the kids in the mornings during the school year. Melissa Benoit said it had gotten itself into their basement one summer and was stuck there for an unknown length of time. When she finally freed it, it stuck around, so Melissa offered the cat some food, which it ate ravenously.

The cat started sleeping at our house: it had to be shooed out of the garage in the evenings, and we’d find it curled up on the rocking chair on the porch first thing in the mornings. We started feeding it. One afternoon when a particularly fierce thunderstorm rolled through town, accompanied by a tornado siren, we made sure to scoop it up from outside and bring it downstairs to the basement to huddle with the children, our pets, and us as we waited for the all-clear. From that day forth it assumed it had the right to enter the house whenever it pleased, and started pawing at the window of my office and yowling whenever it saw me in there.

Whether we liked it or not, the cat appeared to be adopting us as its owners. We called it Orange Cat, because everyone in the neighborhood just referred to it as “the orange cat.” Orange Cat was shockingly gregarious, and unlike our skittish gray cat Ivy, who had always been terrified of the twins, Orange Cat would let them pet her and didn’t flinch whenever they came trundling over shouting “kitty!” at the top of their lungs. I also hold certain beliefs about orange cats vis-à-vis cats of different colors, stemming from my childhood: we had a fat orange cat named Butterscotch who had a bobtail and was the best cat any boy could hope for. He wasn’t shy, he loved to play, he sought out the company of people. While I do not have any hard evidence to back this up, I firmly believe that orange cats possess certain genetic traits that make them cooler and generally more bad-ass than other cats. Nearly every veterinary clinic I’ve been to, for instance, has a clinic cat that just loafs about the place and generally gives zero fucks about anything: those cats, in my experience, are almost always orange cats. When we lived in Vermont, our neighbors had an enormous orange cat named “Compton” for his general street smarts and devil-may-care attitude. Garfield? Orange cat.

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