Remembering Mabel

Mabel arrived as a half-grown tabby from the rescue in 2007 and spent the next seventeen years deciding, entirely on her own terms, exactly how much affection each of us deserved. She was not a lap cat for anyone who wanted her to be one. She was a lap cat when she chose, and it meant all the more for it.

She kept the house to a schedule of her own. The sunny patch on the landing in the morning, the back of the sofa in the afternoon, and the exact centre of the bed at night. She watched the birds from the windowsill for hours and never once caught one, which suited everyone.

In her last year she was thinner and slower, but no less certain of herself. She died at home in the spring, on the warm windowsill she had claimed as her own the day she arrived. The house is very quiet without her small, particular presence.