A Goddess in the House

We have a goddess in the house.
She takes the form of a cat.
We call her Isis.

She was wandering the neighborhood for a couple of months, looking progressively more skinny. So we decided we had to take her in.

This was taken the first day we brought her into the house.

Isis turns out to be a senior cat. We're even more glad we took her in, because due to her age, it's less likely someone else would have.

Here's what my partner Aahz wrote about Isis:

The Goddess taketh, the Goddess giveth back

by Aahz Maruch

...blessed be the Goddess

Summary: we have a new cat, named Isis.

As most of you receiving this know, I'm functionally an atheist. But I'm a *practical* atheist. I believe in the Parking Goddess, I believe in Murphy, and I believe that sometimes, the universe really is trying to send me a message. When that happens (colloquially referred to as "fate"), I often personify it by referring to "the Goddess".

We put our cat Selkie to sleep in January as a result of rapidly-advancing illness. Since mid-February, Stef has been -- not agitating for another cat exactly, but making sure I knew she wanted one. OTOH, while I like having a cat around, I wanted some time off from the grind of feeding and litterbox cleaning. In addition, we were planning a long trip to Canada at the end of August, and I didn't want to leave a cat alone for more than a week.

As Robert Burns said, though, "The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." In mid-March, we decided to shorten our Canadian trip to a long weekend. On Monday, 3/31, two days after I returned from D.C., I was heading out to dinner when I noticed a gray tabby hanging around our back door. We'd been seeing her for a while (and fed her once or twice), but this time we decided that she was too skinny. I figured that we were being Sent A Message from the universe.

We brought her in and kept her for a couple of days (locking her in the upstairs bathroom when she peed in our bedroom). We tried a couple of names on her before settling on Isis. Then we took her to the animal shelter, both for free vet care and to make sure her owners (if any) could find her. That was a mistake. Without denigrating the shelter (which overall does a good job with their resources), Isis was not treated well, despite Stef volunteering several hours a week at the shelter. (Among other things, they claimed that Isis is twelve to fifteen years old, which seems rather suspicious to me -- to my eyes, she could be as young as two, and is more likely six to eight years.)

We took her back home yesterday, and she seems happy to be here. If you want to know what she's like, you'll just have to visit. ;-)

I may make further updates when I feel less sad.