Kate beautifully tells a story about one of her cats. In introducing it, she writes intensely of her feeling for her cats, and it’s about the best paean I’ve ever read. The rest of the post details the arrival of her cat Jacinta. It’s a long post but worth every word.

But the truth is that I adore them. With a love that burns white hot in my throat, my chest, my belly. When I am away from them for longer than a day, my body starts to ache with a phantom limb sort of pain, like phantom organ pain, like a misplaced second heart.

I love the musky warmth of their fur, their sweet, annoying squeaking and meowing and insistent taps of their paw when they want to tell me something, their yummy smelly breath, the way they insist on washing my hands, face, feet with their scratchy tongues as if I were simply a large mostly furless kitty. I love how they see when I’m in A Mood and will sit beside me and meow until I stop whatever frenzied Hoo-Hah I’m lost in to turn to them so that they can do that slow sparkly love blink thing with their eyes and my angst drains out of me like a love-snaked sink.

I love that I share my meals with them, but how no amount of coaxing will get them to break their alpha cat status view of me and just eat off my plate, how they always wait until I pull bits and hand them to them, unless of course we are having roasted chicken in which case all manners and tiers of respect generally go Poof.

I love how their eyes are always clear and bright, that they look me straight in the eye with obvious emotion, communicating directly that they do or do not like what I am doing, that they love me, even when food isn’t involved, that they are checking in, seeing if I am okay. I love that I’ve learned some of their eye signals and we can talk back and forth sometimes with them, but how I often mess it up, get the crinkling corner of the eye wrong, don’t project the energy in the true way, and they look at me like Oh For Freak’s Sake, and bored, look away. I love when I get it right, because it is very, very cool, and they smile, the corners of their mouths lifting, their eyes crinkling and sparkling with Yes.

I love how there is a certain type of meow that lets me know if I have forgotten to pooper scoop, and the other, more plaintive meow that occurs around 4:30 pm to let me know that the dinner hour is approaching. I love how they trust me enough to clip their nails, examine their teeth, or in the case of The Hoon, wash his butt when he was too fat to get around and do it himself and it was really smelly and the other two cats were like, “dude, you wanted to be Katmamma, so this is yo gig, and we ain’t going near that, so party on.” Yeah, that was a day I got to mildly experience how mothers and diapers and hind ends are on intimate terms. Dang. Yeah.

–Kate Turner, Dating God: Fuzzy Love