When Shadow Met Faith

 Hi, I'm Shadow. I was taken to the pet shelter when I was five weeks old and was there for over three months before my Mommy-person brought me home. She was sad because her buddy Tigger had passed away at Christmas. Tigger was 20 years old and couldn’t be replaced, but my Mommy-person couldn’t stand having an empty house any longer. She saw me on her first visit to the shelter but didn’t even think of taking me home because she didn’t want a black cat (how silly is that?). On her second visit I won her over with my antics when I tried to get at the cat in the cage above mine and then when she finally gave in and held me I instantly started to purr and lick her chin. It was love at first sight. She commented that my mischievous ways would be a handful, but she didn’t realize how right those words would prove to be.

The day I came home was Groundhog Day, so she named me Shadow – partly because I was black, but also because the groundhog saw his shadow that day. I’ve also lived up to my name in that I am literally her Shadow. I love to follow her around all the time and have to be involved in whatever she’s doing. They don’t call us cats curious for no reason! I also love to check out anything that isn’t nailed down or locked away. My Mommy-person calls me a kleptomaniac. I’m not sure what that is, but I think it has something to do with me taking her glasses and hiding them while she’s in the shower.

I'm Faith. I came to the shelter when I was only three weeks old and I didn’t like people very much at all, but the nice ladies at the shelter worked really hard with me. I was only in the adoption room for one day when my Mommy-person came in, saw me, and decided to bring me home. She had another cat, Shadow, who was always getting into mischief, so she thought he could use a friend. My Mommy-person named me Faith because despite my tiny size (I was only 1.5 lbs) I didn’t have any hesitation when she brought me home and I went exploring as if I had always lived there. And then when I met Shadow, I just knew he wouldn’t hurt me, not even when I’d walk under him, bite his belly, and then run. Since he outweighed me by nine pounds, my Mommy-person said that took a lot of faith.

Shadow and I were separated when I first came home because our Mommy-person wanted us to get to know each other gradually, and she was really worried about our size difference. She slowly let us play together, which was really Shadow chasing me and me hiding under and behind furniture where he couldn’t get at me. But when I was in my separate room, Shadow would always come and lay outside my door.

Our Mommy-person feared that we would never get along, but the turning point came one day when Shadow chased me right through his food dish. I stopped to eat and he stopped dead in his tracks and lay down to watch me eat. The look on his face was priceless. None of his toys had ever eaten his food before!

Shadow inched a little closer to see if I was really eating his food. He couldn't believe his eyes!

He finally decided that he may as well join me before I ate everything up. From that day on we were inseparable and we like to eat out of the same food dish together.  

 Shadow started to teach me how to play with all of his toys. We love it when the Mommy-person tosses toys down the hall for us to run after, and then we run back to see what she’ll throw next. We call this game “Kitty Olympics” and by the time we’re done we usually have about thirty toys that need to be picked up.  One of our Mommy-person’s friends said we have too many toys, but we don’t really think that’s possible, is it?

We love to chase each other through the house and up and down our six-foot cat tree, and sit in the windows and watch the birds at all the feeders that our Mommy-person keeps full. We get to see cardinals, finches, woodpeckers, and of course - lots of squirrels and chipmunks!

All of this activity wears us out, so when we get tired we curl up and take our cat naps together. Our Momy-person often wonders how sane she was to go from one well-behaved 20-year-old kitty to two rambunctious, mischievous kittens, but she says that our antics make her laugh, and that’s what it’s all about.