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If you’ve visited this page before, you know the answer to this question already.

Before I was born my parents moved from Dorchester to Tewksbury. From the city to the suburbs, which from their point of view was sort of like the most rural place in the known universe. They were both under the impression that living in the country meant you had to have pets. They were wrong, but it took time to figure it out. They got a dog. It might have been two dogs. The experiments ended badly. I don’t know the details, but they got rid of them after a relatively short period of time.

At some point after I came into the picture with my curly red hair that magically straightened itself by the time I was old enough to go to school but seems to be coming back now that I am an old fart my mother’s little sister’s cat, Heidi, had kittens. One of those kittens came to live with us. Her name was Fluffy. Fluffy Puffy to be precise. Our house was on a busy state highway and it wasn’t long before our indoor cat got out and bought it while trying to cross the road. That was it as far as pets were concerned. Well, apart from some fish and a short lived hamster. I don’t have any memories of dogs but I do have some vague impressions of the cat. Just a weird image of me chasing it down the hallway.

From then on I have been a cat person, but it wasn’t until we bought our house in 2010 that I stopped being the guy who loved other people’s cats and started being someone who lived with cats.

Patches came first. We adopted her shortly after we moved into the new house.

Patches was literally, objectively, the best cat ever. We lost her to cancer a couple of days after Christmas last year.

Earlier this year we adopted Robin and Lily. We went to the MSPCA looking for two cats that were bonded together already. Lily is Robin’s kitten and in order to adopt one we had to adopt both. That was perfect, just like they are.