I’ve hated cats all my life. Well, maybe not all my life. My mom has a picture of me, maybe six years old, playing with kittens in my grandpa’s barn, and I remember begging to take that little furball home. But my mom hated cats, and I soon did too.
My husband’s family had a cat, and when we were dating, I shuddered whenever I visited. The creature was unbearably forward and gross. I was convinced the cat tried to kill me one night by sitting on my head while I slept, even though my husband insists she was just being cozy.
My thinking on felines held firm for about two decades. Our sweet dogs were all the pets I ever wanted, while cats, by contrast, were disgusting to me. They walked on tables with their little cat feet. They seemed mysterious and inscrutable.
I rolled all cats together with the evil Snowbell from E. B. White’s Stuart Little: “malevolent, self-absorbed, negative, obstinate, witty, bellicose, evil, loathsome, loquacious, testy, ingenious, narcissistic,…
