My wife and I were pleased that we put a small cat door in our wagon shed so stray cats could enter if there was a storm or blizzard. But, one female cat decided to live under my wife’s car in the parking lot, so last winter I grabbed this cat and put her in the 1804 Town Crier’s house, where my son’s house cat once lived, but passed away.
This stray cat enjoyed the warmth of our house better than living under my wife’s automobile, so I called her “Sister” in honor of my real sister, Sylvia, who lives near Allentown. She was still an outside feline who enjoyed living outside with the stray cats that frequented the wagon shed. Thankful that I brought her inside to live, she naturally took a liking to me and was jealous of my wife, Eleanor; she hissed at her on occasion, but went upstairs with me when I went to bed at night.
However, we eventually put a litter box in each of our five fireplaces for her to use after eating cat food in the kitchen. She generally did not try to run out of the outside kitchen door; becoming a domesticated loyal cat, she sat with me watching TV, hugging close to my lap. Eventually, Assistant Director Richard Orth gave me a striped cat we called “Sergeant.” Sergeant and Sister became loyal house pets.
I followed our household routine until I went upstairs to go to bed at night, where they would both nestle on the floor rug of my bedroom. We did not wish our home to be a refuge for stray cats. However, there was one outside cat we call “Twiner” because he was an identical cat to another one that lived in the wagon shed. We have enough stowaway felines for now, since our back porch swing has become a shelter, as well.
Bedding down animals on a cold winter’s eve was an example of Christian livelihood among PA Dutch farm families and has usually been an extension of their brotherly love for man and beast, especially the animals who are dependent on man’s humanitarian belief in a divine Creator upon which our civilization became very humane in the United States.
My wife cannot help but be amused when we retire in the evening and I grab some cat treats in the kitchen to go upstairs and call our house cats one by one to go to sleep. I am accustomed to bedding down my farm animals years ago in the snowy Oley mountains when I first took over my great uncle Freddy Bieber’s farm near to the Pricetown Ridge, when I had two horses named “Thunder” and “Lightning.” I always made sure my animals had food the night before, since being transferred to a new barn and location then in the 1960s, until now in the Kutztown Borough.
Richard H. Shaner is director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
