Dewey's Nine Lives

FOUR

Tabitha, Boogie, Gail, BJ, Chimilee, Kit, Miss Gray, Maira, Midnight, Blackie, Honey Bunny, Chazzi, Candi, Nikki, Easy, Buffy, Prissy, Taffy . . . and more

“When I was reading your book I had to think of what a great book it would have been if I would have kept a diary of our times here on Sanibel Island, FL. My husband manages a resort on the island and I work reservations and one night we were taking a walk on the grounds and a lovely cat followed us home and so of course I fed her and she of course kept coming back. . . . Well, to make a long story short, we ended up with 28 cats.”

I love Sanibel Island, Florida.I’vetraveledall over the country to library conferences—and enjoyed every dancing, laughing minute of it—but nothing, for me, compares to that special island. Thanks to my brother Mike, who was friends with the former manager, I’ve been visiting a resort there called Premier Properties of Pointe Santo de Sanibel for more than twenty years. I was there the week after Dewey died, in fact. Brother Mike’s daughter was getting married, and I was packing for the trip when I got the call. Dewey wasn’t acting like himself.

I immediately rushed to the library to pick him up and take him to the vet. I thought it was constipation, a frequent problem for our elderly cat. I was stunned when the doctor used words like tumor, cancer, intense pain, and no hope. I felt as if I had been flattened by a hammer blow, but when I looked into Dewey’s eyes, I could tell it was true. He had been hiding it from me for weeks, possibly months, but he wasn’t hiding it now. He was hurting. And he was asking for my help.

I signed the paperwork. I held him in my arms and against my heart. I watched his eyes close. I arranged for his cremation, numb from the shock. Then, still in a fog, I rushed home to finish packing, picked up my father at his house half a day later than planned, and drove to Omaha. I rushed to my daughter’s house, hugged my twin grandchildren, and hustled everyone to the airport. Our bottoms didn’t hit our seats, I think, until a second before the airplane took off. And then of course the twins, who were only two, needed juice and crayons and a hug until the plane leveled out and their ears stopped hurting. When I finally caught my breath somewhere in the sky over Missouri, I picked up the ratty old airline magazine. Someone had already filled in the crossword puzzle. In pen. Ugh. On the next page, though, was a picture of a cat. I started crying, and cried all the way to Sanibel Island.

There is no better place to mourn. Sanibel Island, and in particular Premier Properties of Pointe Santo, is the most relaxing spot on earth. The beach is crystal white, and there is hardly anyone on it. Well, except “no-see-ums,” evil little creatures that will bite you mercilessly if your bare flesh touches the sand. But, really, that is a small price for a paradise where you can walk (in flip-flops) along the surf, picking up coral-colored seashells, and sit on your balcony, watching mother dolphins and their babies leaping offshore. In the afternoon, I like to relax to the arguing of the mockingbirds that call back and forth to each other “Whhhaat?” (that’s the male, I’ve decided) and “Uh-uh” (that’s the sass-talking female). Even the four-foot alligator on the property is cool. You see him sometimes shuffling lazily across the lawn, completely ignoring the lounge chairs.

Then there are the sunsets. In Iowa, once in a while you get a blast of color at the end of the day, with pinks and oranges and gold. On Sanibel Island, it’s always like that, the vivid colors dominating the sky and then sinking slowly into the gorgeous blue gulf waters and bringing out the stars. You look up from the beach, or from the wine you’re sipping on your balcony, and feel happy and free, awed by the natural beauty and ready to toast a perfect end to another glorious day.

Or that’s usually how it is. With a wedding to attend and long-absent relatives to soothe (and sometimes pretend to ignore), the week after Dewey’s death was going to be crazy, even before the emotional bombshell of his passing. Fortunately, my granddaughter Hannah, the flower girl, distracted me in the unique manner of children: She gave me the flu. Along with twenty-seven other people at the rehearsal dinner. I spent most of the week watching cartoons with Hannah on the sofa, and I spent more time on my knees staring into the toilet bowl than I did watching dolphins frolic in the surf. I was too weak for the telephone, television, or e-mail (I was barely strong enough to follow Dora the Explorer’s mind-numbing adventures, in fact), so I had no idea that back home, Dewey’s popularity was exploding and the library phones were ringing off the hook. I could only look out the window at the ocean and think what a small piece of the world we all were, and how nice it was that the bathroom was only ten feet from the television. Even when you’re vomiting five times a day, there is nothing quite like the peace of Sanibel Island.

So I know what Mary Nan Evans meant when she told me that her thought, on seeing Sanibel Island for the first time, was: “There is no way I could ever afford to live here.” Paradise, after all, had been reserved long ago for the rich and powerful, and like me, Mary Nan was a small-town girl from the Midwest. Her husband, Larry, a maintenance man at a hospital in Waverly, Missouri, had won employee of the year for the state’s western district, and the prize was four days on this small island off the southwest coast of Florida. Mary Nan had been to Florida many times before—she had an aunt who lived in Fort Myers, just up the coast—but the merging of the brilliant blue sky and the brilliant blue water around the tight green strip of Sanibel Island was like nothing she had ever seen. Even the white buildings visible on the horizon looked like the sharpened edges of clouds. As she crossed the long causeway linking the island to the mainland, she thought to herself, Remember this, Mary Nan, because you’ll never be back.

Four years later, in 1984, she and Larry were back, at least in Florida. This time, they weren’t looking for a four-day break from their ordinary lives; they were looking for a job. With Larry’s fifteen years in maintenance, they felt confident he could find work at one of the many resorts that dotted the coast. And the resorts offered accommodations, since being the maintenance director for a large complex of buildings full of tourists who can’t survive a busted ice machine for twenty minutes, let alone two hours, was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job full of people making demands and odd requests. But there was one problem. When Larry mentioned that he owned a cat, the resorts turned him down. Sorry, they said. No animals allowed.

Getting rid of Tabitha, their beloved Siamese, was out of the question. Larry and Mary Nan had adopted her fifteen years earlier, in 1969, when Larry was stationed in California at the end of his military service. Just before Thanksgiving, Mary Nan had seen an ad in the base newspaper: newborn kittens available for adoption. They only had twenty dollars, saved by serious scrimping on an enlisted man’s pay, but Mary Nan convinced Larry to have a look. As soon as they arrived at the apartment, a bundle of tiny Siamese kittens came tumbling out of a back room. Most of them were wobbling and falling over, but one came straight to Mary Nan and stumbled into her arms. Mary Nan held the kitten to her chest, and it stretched up and nuzzled her chin.

“I really want a girl,” she told the woman with the cats.

“Well, you’re holding the only one,” the woman replied.

Mary Nan gave the woman ten dollars for her expenses and left with Tabitha. She spent most of the rest of their life’s savings on litter and cat food. That Thanksgiving, Mary Nan and Larry Evans sat down at the dinner table and said grace over two aluminum-tray TV dinners. Mary Nan can’t exactly recall, but it was probably Swanson’s turkey and gravy. With that little cherry pie on the side. After buying cat food, it was the only Thanksgiving dinner they could afford.

But Tabitha was worth it, because she was the sweetest, most loyal cat any couple could ask for. She never wanted anything but her food. She never made more than a polite sound. She never craved the company of anyone but her parents but was never rude to visitors or handymen. As long as she was in the house, Tabitha wasn’t worried about anything. She slept. She lounged. She let Larry vacuum her neck and the top of her head—yes, with the hose from the vacuum cleaner—closing her eyes as the blast of air sucked away her loose fur. “She even made friends with a mouse,” Larry told me in amazement. More than once, he found her in the living room just staring as an ancient, gray-whiskered mouse (according to Larry, who is apparently an expert on mouse whiskers) tottered off to his hole. I have no idea how Mary Nan put up with that. I would have demanded my cat—or at least Larry—get rid of that mouse. But she never held this act of clemency against Tabitha. Every night, the cat slept in the center of the bed, right between Larry and Mary Nan. If Mary Nan awoke during the night, she’d often find Tabitha sitting on her chest, staring into her face. Completely mouse-free.

Mary Nan wasn’t shy about telling herself, Larry, or any of her friends about Tabitha’s role in the family. She and Larry weren’t able to have children (Tabitha couldn’t either, although that was her owner’s decision), and Tabitha was like the daughter they’d never have to argue with or beg not to date that “bad boy” all the girls were cooing over. For a while, Mary Nan even carried Tabitha around in a baby blanket her grandmother had crocheted for her.

Of course, cats aren’t children, and they also weren’t allowed in their military-base apartment, so Mary Nan was careful to keep Tabitha a secret from the neighbors. When she took Tabby to the car for a vet’s visit, she carried her not in a cage but in a brown paper bag, like a sack of groceries. Tabitha never complained. Not once. In fact, she loved it. Brown paper bags became her favorite toys, and she’d roll around with her head inside them for what seemed like hours. She also loved the car. Often, she would meow at the apartment door, begging to be taken down to the car. On mild weather days, and there were a lot of those in Southern California, Mary Nan would leave the cat curled up on the hump in the backseat, which Tabby had torn to shreds with her claws. A little food and water, and Tabby would have lived in the car. She loved it that much.

But by the time Mary Nan and Larry visited Sanibel Island, Tabby was getting older. After Larry left the military, the family moved back to his hometown of Carrollton, Missouri, a little community of about four thousand people, where he had seen Mary Nan for the first time at the skating rink when she was almost sixteen and he was barely twenty. In Missouri, Larry worked as a maintenance man; Mary Nan kept the house. They were content. But the cold Missouri winters were hard on Tabby’s joints, and after twelve good years, she began slowing down. Mary Nan took a blanket Larry’s grandmother had knitted and folded it on the floor in front of the heater vent. Tabby sat on the blanket until she was steaming hot, but the cat sauna didn’t help her aching joints. Tabby was the love of their lives, and she was in decline.

There was no way Larry and Mary Nan were leaving her behind. Not for a month, not for a week, not even if it meant the end of Mary Nan’s dream of a life in Florida (and it was her dream, not Larry’s) and a long trip back to Carrollton, Missouri, in defeat.

“I have one more place to call,” Larry told his wife after two weeks of searching. “If this doesn’t work out, we’ll head home.”

He made the call. “I just want to tell you up front,” he said, “that I have a cat, and I’m not getting rid of her.”

“So what?” the man on the other end of the line replied. “I have two.”

A few weeks later, Larry, Mary Nan, and Tabby Evans had moved all of their possessions into a little bungalow across the street from the Colony Resort on Sanibel Island. This time, Mary Nan knew she was in paradise to stay. The resort was on the eastern, residential end of the island, away from the crowded shops and high-rise developments. The individually owned bungalows and condominiums of Colony Resort were scattered around a property filled with palm trees, bushes, and the grassy areas between them. To the east, a boardwalk led across 160 feet of sparsely overgrown sand dunes to a wide white beach and the gorgeous blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A short walk down the beach was the tip of the island, with its famous light-house. After dark, the sky was black and full of stars since no street-lights have ever been allowed to mar the quiet wonder of a Sanibel Island night.

Even Tabby, fifteen years old and increasingly arthritic, was rejuvenated. Mary Nan donned a pair of khaki casual shorts and a permanent smile, bought a fat-tired bicycle with a basket on the front, and Tabitha rode with her everywhere. While the girls were out on their leisurely errands, Larry used his weekends to screen in the porch on the back of the bungalow, and after a strenuous morning of basket-sitting (that wind can be murder on a cat’s fur!), Tabitha would lay out there all afternoon, warmed by the sun and refreshed by the cool island breeze. Mary Nan and Tabby spent hours together on that porch, Mary Nan with her cross-stitch and Tabby with nothing to do but enjoy her old age.

Maybe it was the sight of Tabby luxuriating on her private porch that attracted the little dappled cat. Maybe it was the obvious love (and food) Mary gave her sweet Siamese. Or maybe it was just inevitable. Sanibel Island in the 1980s was crawling with feral cats. You would see them everywhere: running through the bushes beside the street, poking around backyard barbeques, scrounging through the sea grass-covered empty lots that would, over the years, be turned into oceanfront estates, hotels, and high-rise condominiums. Maybe the dappled cat was just trying to find an easier way to survive in paradise when she followed Mary Nan and Larry home from their walk one night. She couldn’t get onto the porch, but she was hanging around the front door every time they came out.

“I’m going to give that kitten some milk,” Mary Nan told Larry after a few days of watching the cat watching her. The poor thing was as skinny as a sandpiper and nearly as skittish, but once Mary Nan started feeding her, she never left the yard.

“I figured,” Larry muttered, rolling his eyes with a bemused smile.

“What should I name her?” Mary Nan asked the two little boys who lived next door.

“Call her Boogie,” they said.

“What’s a boogie?”

The boys looked at each other. “I don’t know,” one of them replied.

“Okay,” Mary Nan said with a smile. “Boogie it is.”

Two months later, Larry stopped outside the front door on his way to work. “Mary Nan,” he called to his wife, the good-natured exasperation evident in his voice, “you better come out and see what you’ve done.”

On the front porch were three gorgeous, wiggly, sop-eared kittens. Boogie’s kittens.

“I guess we have five cats now,” Mary Nan said, going inside for a jug of milk. Four for the yard, and Tabitha asleep on the porch.

A year later, the resort manager retired. Larry became the manager, Mary Nan took over the front desk, and the whole family moved across the street to a bungalow on the resort property. By then, Tabitha had passed away. Her health had been in serious decline for months, but Mary Nan and Larry couldn’t bring themselves to put her down. In her last week, Larry had to go to the mainland for business. Mary Nan and Tabitha went for the car ride. Riding on that torn-up seat hump was still Tabby’s favorite activity, even better than the bicycle or the porch. To sneak her into the hotel, Mary Nan had to swaddle her in a blanket and pretend she was their child, just as she had when Tabby was a kitten, but the effort was worth it. While Larry worked, Mary Nan drove Tabitha around Fort Myers and twenty miles up and down the coast.

When they got home, they took Tabby to the vet. “It’s time,” he said simply. Mary Nan and Larry didn’t reply. They knew he was right, and it was the hardest thing they had ever endured. Tabitha had been like a daughter to them. She had comforted them with her presence, her persistent love, and her refusal to date the wrong men. Even though they knew she was suffering, putting her down was like tearing away a piece of their hearts. That afternoon, Larry and Mary Nan sat together on a bench, just staring at the ocean and crying in each other’s arms.

But they still had four cats: Boogie, the original dappled kitten that had walked into Mary Nan’s heart, and her three babies. They were outdoor cats, of course, but they apparently had no intention of ever wandering out of sight. Since Sanibel Island summer days were often hot, Larry built a cat house outside the bungalow porch. The box was about four feet by four feet, with a wooden roof for shade and mesh walls to let the breeze blow through. It even had a fan with a mesh cover to keep the kittens cool on those rare sweltering days when the ocean winds didn’t blow.

From the comfort of her porch, Mary Nan watched her cats, thinking of those quiet days with Tabitha and wishing she had such a nice fan for her own house. She watched soon after as one of the cats gave birth to a gaggle of moist, hairless kittens on the roof of the cat house. And she watched the next day as one of the mewling babies, still with its eyes shut and too small to walk, rolled right off the roof and out of sight. Mary Nan ran out expecting an injured or dead little kitten, but the baby was alive and unhurt, lying in a bundle on the grass and crying softly for its mother.

I really should get these cats fixed, she thought.

With so many cats to feed—there were now seven—Larry placed a line of bowls outside the bungalow door. Every morning, before his own breakfast, he filled each one with food. The cats came running . . . all to the same bowl. No matter how many options they were given, they all wanted to eat out of the same bowl at the same time. The kittens would crawl over each other, stumbling, falling, getting in fights, while the older cats stuck their snouts in the bowl and gulped down food while trying to ram each other away with the top of their heads. Mary Nan and Larry couldn’t help but laugh.

Eventually, the food began to attract more feral cats. First it was ten. Then twelve. Then . . . where did that cat come from? Larry would wonder. Do I know that cat? It sure seems eager and entitled. But . . . Aww, what the heck, Larry thought, give them another handful of food. Mary Nan was the one who began to name them. It seemed the best way, in conjunction with spaying the cats she considered her own, to keep the colony organized. But the cats refused to cooperate. They kept coming and going, but mostly coming in greater and greater numbers. It wasn’t long before you couldn’t walk ten steps at Colony Resort without a cat racing across your path. Every time Mary Nan and Larry walked down the boardwalk to the beach—and they walked down to the beach holding hands every single evening after work for two decades—a parade of cats followed them like a herd of ducklings. They could hear the stampede of paws pounding along the boards, the sound mixing finally with the soft crashing of the waves as the little group cleared the last of the dunes. Some of the cats would wander into the dunes—you know how cats are with sand—but most waited on the boardwalk, wrestling each other or chasing invisible-to-the-human-eye “bugs” until Larry and Mary Nan returned from their evening stroll. Then the gaggle would turn back along the boardwalk and head for home.

Chazzi, Taffy, Buffy, Miss Gray.

Maira. Midnight. Blackie. Candi. Nikki. Easy.

“Can you remember any more?” Mary Nan said over her shoulder, with the phone still to her ear.

“I don’t know,” Larry said in the background. “Did you say Chimilee?”

“Of course I said Chimilee, Larry. He was my favorite.” When he was a kitten, Chimilee’s front leg was badly injured, most likely in a fight, and the veterinary bill was $160. After the surgery, Mary Nan told Larry, “That cat is mine. I’ve got too much invested in him just to let him go.” So Chimilee—who Mary Nan claims looked like Dewey—moved into the bungalow. He was a big, sweet twenty-two-pound yellow cat who loved lounging on Mary Nan and Larry but never minded sharing them with a growing assortment of furry pals. After Chimilee, Mary Nan reasoned, there was no reason to consider the indoors off-limits to the other cats, so she opened the window every night for the breeze. She figured most of the cats wouldn’t bother coming inside, since they had it so cushy outside, but a few nights later, Larry tried to turn over in bed and found himself trapped under a mound of fur.

What in the heck is going on here? he remembered thinking. “There must have been twenty cats in that bed,” Larry told me with a laugh.

“No, Larry, come on now,” said Mary Nan, “there were only five. But they were fat. We slept with more than eighty pounds of cat every night.”

After a few days, Mary Nan closed the window, so it really was only five—except on really hot days, when she left the window open and ten or twelve cats wandered in. It was never the ton of cats in the bed that bothered Mary Nan, though. Or the scratched-up sofa and hair-covered chairs. It was the lizards those cats carried into the living room to torture. And that one awful snake.

“It was hard work,” Mary Nan admitted, which made Larry laugh. After all, he was the one who cleaned the litter and served the food. He was the one who got up in the middle of the night when the darn cats wouldn’t stop banging on the kitchen cabinet where their food was stored. He was the one who took them to the vet when they needed it and built the special cage for BJ, who got himself sliced in a fight. The vet gave him some medicine and a patch called New-Skin to cover the wound. BJ didn’t have a tooth in his head—“he had a mouth like a rock crusher,” as Larry put it—but he always managed to get into tussles and knock the patch off. Mr. Bandage, Carl the groundskeeper called him, because for six months the New Skin was hanging half off his leg or lying in the grass somewhere. So Larry built a special cage, and BJ was quarantined until his leg healed. Then, with that problem solved, Larry fixed the condo screens the cats had torn. And repaired their cat house. And mended the shredded curtains. And shooed cats away from the fountain in the courtyard, where they were always trying to drink.

One day, Mary Nan passed a ladder and saw two cats sitting on each rung. Larry needs to put this stuff away, she thought. A few evenings later, Larry opened his barbeque grill to light it and found a cat inside. He picked up a huge piece of driftwood from the beach so they could sharpen their claws. That’ll keep them busy, he thought. Within a few years, it was nothing but a nub, and they still had a four-inch patch on each corner of their sofa where the cats had scratched down to the frame. Larry got the vacuum out every night to suck up the shards of driftwood and cloth.

When they overran the food bowls outside the bungalow, Larry decided to scatter more bowls around the property. Every morning, while Mary Nan fixed breakfast, Larry drove around on his golf cart to the various food bowls. There would be cats lounging in the back and cats clinging to the sides of the cart, trying to open the food bags. He worried at first, but after a while he just whizzed around the property with cats occasionally tumbling off and rolling to their feet in the grass. The feeding trip took most of an hour, and when he finally arrived home and sat down for breakfast, he’d look out the window and see five or six cat staring at his toast and jam.

“They’re hungry again,” he’d mutter to Mary Nan between mouthfuls of the healthy oatmeal she forced on him though he much preferred bacon and eggs.

And they’d laugh. There was never a moment, after all, when a cat wasn’t hungry. They’d follow Larry on his golf cart runs around the property, whining for food. They followed Mary Nan to her car, and she’d have to back out very slowly to keep from running them down. They’d follow her into the office and trail her in a long line as she went around the sidewalks picking up lizard tails, because when geckos get scared, they lose their tails, and the poor lizards at the Colony Resort lived in constant fear of the cats.

The only time you wouldn’t see cats at the Colony Resort was after the bombing run. In those days, Sanibel Island used old military bombers to spray for mosquitoes. They’d fly just above the tree-tops and drop poisonous spray over every inch of the island. One second, it was silence and clear blue skies; the next, an old airplane would appear with an earth-shaking drone. The cats would jump up and bolt away in a panic. It was a shame to see them so terrified, but Mary Nan had to admit it was amusing to see twenty cats scatter in every direction like a double set of bowling pins.

One day, Mary Nan ran into Carl the groundskeeper at one of the bungalows in the far corner of the property. He was casually raking the lawn, like nothing unusual was going on, but there was a cat hanging off each of his pant legs.

“They’re trying to get my treats,” Carl told Mary Nan. He had taken to keeping cat treats in his pockets, and apparently it wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to have cats hanging off his hips, trying to steal a bite or two.

“It wasn’t just time consuming,” Larry laughed. “It was expensive.” But Larry and Mary Nan didn’t want it any other way. Between the cats, the staff, and the resort guests, their childless union was bursting with companionship and love.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF LARRY

7:30 Wake up. Shove forty pounds of cat off bed. Trudge into kitchen to open bottom cabinet, where cat food is kept. As usual, trapped cat comes waltzing out, licking its lips.

7:40 Start golf cart for morning round . . . of feeding cats. Visit “nine hole course” of bowls scattered around resort. Try not to send hitchhiking cats flying off cart around corners.

8:30 Breakfast of oatmeal instead of eggs. Darn Mary Nan’s health fads.

9:00 Workday officially starts. Cats rush out when workshop door opened since they sleep in the shop when the temperature drops below forty degrees. They think that’s brutally cold. Reason #103 why Sanibel Island is the best! Buffy asleep in toolbox again.

9:18 Check overnight work orders in office. Kiss Mary Nan at front desk. No cats allowed, but Gail has snuck in as usual.

9:32 Inspect torn screen cited in work order. Notice cat claws stuck in mesh.

9:45 Open garage to retrieve new screen material. No cats! Whoops, there was one asleep on the ladder.

11:18 Finish installing screen. Notice young boy and cat watching. Both look disappointed.

11:38 Check chemical level in pool. Notice a cat drinking out of the shallow end. Then notice it isn’t a cat. It’s a raccoon. It stops to sample cat food before waddling off.

12:02 Lunch with Mary Nan in the office. Gail watches, but no handouts.

12:32 Shoo cats out from under the car, walk around twice to make sure they have all left, then back up very slowly and proceed to town to pick up mail.

1:13 Take golf cart around resort to inspect grounds. Cats are sleeping in pile on the rack. How many? Maybe four, but too tightly packed to be sure. Cats along route look up briefly, then fall back to sleep. They know this isn’t the food run.

1:40 Prune trees with Carl the groundskeeper. Cats crowd around to watch. Cat starts gagging, then throws up a lizard tail. Clean up lizard tail.

5:00 Workday officially ends, but tree branches still need to be hauled away.

5:35 Evening meal run. Gail in the back of the golf cart, munching food from the bag.

6:23 Walk to beach with Mary Nan. Pretend cats aren’t following.

7:28 Late dinner. Cats staring in window, begging for food. Where are the curtains?

7:31 Rehang rod that collapsed when cats tried to climb curtains. Pretend there are still eight scratches in the fabric, like yesterday, not thirteen.

7:42 Back to dinner and big staring cat eyes. Oh, what the heck, throw them a few handfuls of food.

8:15 Inspection of bungalow for minor cat damage. Nothing but shards of driftwood. Find three cats, as usual, crammed in the little space between the headboard and the mattress of the bed.

9:00 Kick Maira and Chimi out of the big lounge chair. Watch some TV.

9:36 Almost tell Chimi not to sharpen his claws on the sofa, then remember that both front corners of the sofa have four-inch-square patches where cats have shredded them down to the wooden frame. Decide to sip soda instead. Wish it was soda. It’s water. Darn health fads.

11:30 End of local news. Time for bed. Settle onto mattress in typical cat, Mary Nan, cat, cat, Larry, cat order.

11:35 Turn off light, reposition cats three times, find comfortable position, and go to sleep.

12:34 Wake up to bang, bang, bang from the kitchen. Cats are trying to open the cabinet again. Realize this will go on for fifteen minutes until they finally succeed. Contemplate getting up but decide instead to just let the darn cat out, no doubt licking its lips, first thing in the morning. Fall back asleep with a smile.

One evening, no doubt while Mary Nan and Larry were being eye-balled in their scratched-up chairs by several lethargic cats, there was a knock at the bungalow door. Standing outside was a small boy, about eleven years old, whose family had been coming to the resort for several years. In his arms was a beautiful tan kitten.

“Can I have this cat?” the little boy asked, with big pleading eyes. “I love this cat.”

Mary Nan was hesitant. She knew the family and liked them, but she didn’t have any idea how well they would care for a cat. And, truth be told, she wasn’t sure where that little tan cat had come from. Had she even seen it before? Was it really hers to give? Apparently, it had been staying in the family’s rented condo, against resort regulations, so Mary Nan figured the cat was a regular resort resident. And since the parents were as enthusiastic to adopt it as the boy, and since the tan kitten really seemed to have taken to the family, she agreed to let it return with them to north Florida.

For several weeks, she was nervous. What had she done? What might have befallen that poor cat? What did she think she was, an adoption agency? Then, just as she was beginning to drive herself crazy, she received a thank-you note with a snapshot of the kitten. Every few months, the family sent her another photograph of the cat in his new home, surrounded by love and lapping up the attention like a forgotten glass of milk left sitting on the kitchen table. Every year, when the family returned to the Colony Resort, they shared more pictures and stories of the cat that had, truly, become a member of their family.

A frequent visitor from Miami was more direct. Connie simply told Mary Nan, “I’m taking these two cats.” She already had five cats at home, but she couldn’t leave without the two friends she’d made over a series of visits. As long as the cats are happy, Mary Nan thought, as ten other cats watched her from the rungs of a ladder. Larry, it seemed, was always leaving that ladder around.

It wasn’t as if Mary Nan didn’t know these people. The Colony was a family-oriented resort, and most of the renters had been coming for years. Some were second generation, following the path of their parents; some viewed the visit as an opportunity to bring together three or even four generations under the Sanibel sun. A vast majority had a standing reservation and came for the same week or two every year, and by the second or third visit, most came expecting cats. They asked about the cats when confirming reservations, and their ridiculous antics—falling off the towel bin while wrestling, taking naps in beach bags, snacking on lizard tails—were the talk of the poolside lounge chairs. The children, especially, loved chasing, feeding, hugging, and petting the most pampered crowd of feral kittens north of Ernest Hemingway’s twelve-toed heirs in Key West. (He’d promised all his cats’ descendants permanent residence at his house in his will, and they’d taken to inbreeding like mad.) Every visitor to the Colony, it seemed, had a favorite cat or two.

But no matter how many cats found homes, or how many guests spoke fondly of different kittens, the star of the resort was always Gail, the lone female in Boogie’s original litter. Gail was pure white, with soft fluffy fur and an endearing pink nose. In the sunlight, she absolutely shone. Nobody could miss seeing her amid the swirl of fur; everyone felt compelled to comment on her unique beauty and regal bearing. And like Dewey, she had a warm, calm, generous personality to match that outward charm.

One regular guest, Dr. Niki Kimling, a psychologist from Stamford, Connecticut, was particularly smitten. Dr. Kimling loved the Colony cats, and always brought them exotic toys and playthings. One year, she left twenty-five cans of expensive cat food for their Christmas feast—much preferred to their regular fare of dry kibble. But no matter how much Dr. Kimling pampered the other cats, Gail was her favorite. Every year, she called a few weeks before her visit and requested the company of Gail. The cats weren’t supposed to stay inside the condominiums, but for eight days every year, Gail lived with Dr. Kimling, who would buy her expensive cat food, brush her, sleep with her, and basically spoil her rotten. If Gail could have been spoiled rotten, that is. Gail never let popularity change her easygoing personality (like Dewey; so cats can manage to control that feline ego), and she never insisted on being an indoor cat at any other time of the year. But she remembered Dr. Kimling, and she loved with complete abandon her eight days a year as the doctor’s “rented” cat.

Renter, adopter, or merely a petter, if you were a cat lover, the Colony was for you. In the decade since Mary Nan took Boogie into her heart, the resort had become, quite by accident, a little patch of cat heaven in the paradise of Sanibel. You couldn’t walk five feet without seeing cats hiding under the bushes, strolling across your path, or chasing each other across the lawns. Every day, it seemed, Mary Nan spotted cats lounging on closed screened porches and coming out of bungalows with happy guests, even though they weren’t allowed in the rental units.

And it wasn’t just cats. One afternoon, Mary Nan looked out her window and saw eight cats and two raccoons lying on a bench in the warm winter Sanibel sun. Another time, a guest spotted a raccoon washing its hands in the pool. The wild animals, she realized, had moved right onto the grounds and mixed with the feral cats. Neither group seemed to mind. The cats, in fact, didn’t seem to mind any other animals. Except for the palm rats. Sanibel Island’s least popular guests (with the exception of the big tropical roaches known as palmetto bugs) were the rats that liked to hide in the leaves of the island’s ever-present palm trees. Mary Nan might not have been able to open her eyes without seeing a cat, but she never, not once, saw a palm rat on the grounds of the Colony Resort. Not when there were twenty-eight cats roaming the few acres of ground. And that was just the cats Mary Nan had identified and named.

Of course, as I know from my adventures with Dewey, there are always people uncomfortable with attempts at fostering feline-human friendship. I’m sure the resort’s board of directors heard plenty of complaints, although I’m also sure they kept them from Mary Nan. They were supportive, perhaps beyond the bounds of rationality, but eventually even the directors had enough. They weren’t opposed to cats on the property, but the current population was way beyond their comfort zone. Despite the protests of some guests, Mary Nan and Larry agreed the cat colony at the Colony Resort would have to be trimmed. It was time. Larry was spending hours every day filling food bowls, inspecting the cats for signs of illness or injury, and repairing cat-damaged items. The outdoor cats, although well cared for, were less healthy than house cats, and leukemia and FIV, the cat form of AIDS, spread widely through the population. The average life expectancy at Colony Resort was only eight or nine years, and putting down so many cats took an emotional toll on Larry and Mary Nan.

It was hardest on Larry, who always took them for their final shots. Putting down Easy, Carl the groundskeeper’s favorite cat, was especially difficult. She was so old and weak, her circulatory system had collapsed, and Larry had to hold her down while the veterinarian poked repeatedly at her backside. She cried, and stared into Larry’s eyes with fear and accusation, until Larry felt like the lowest heel in the world. Then she shut her eyes and died. He left the office crying, with her limp body in his arms, and brought her home to be buried. He was in such an emotional fog, he forgot to pay the veterinary bill.

Through natural death and the occasional adoption, Mary Nan began to slowly pare down the number of cats living at the resort. With the help of a donation from Gail’s friend and benefactor Dr. Kimling, and with vouchers donated by the South Trail Animal Hospital in Fort Myers, she started to spay and neuter the rest of the colony. A nonprofit organization called PAWS Rescue had recently been formed to neuter and find homes for the feral cats of Sanibel, so all over the island the cat population was being contained. Mary Nan once mentioned to a member of the organization, “I wish I could do more to help you.”

“Don’t worry,” the woman replied. “You’re running your own PAWS organization out there.”

Most of the cats at Colony Resort came in quietly for their trip to the vet, either because of their trust in Mary Nan and Larry or through blissful ignorance of what awaited them. Some cats resisted. Some, more feral than the others, were simply hard to catch. It took weeks for Mary to capture Prissy, a huge, muscular male cat that was completely misnamed. She managed to struggle him into a carrier for his trip to the vet, but then made the mistake of reaching in to adjust the blanket she used to make the trip more comfortable. Prissy lashed out and scratched her from her elbow to her wrist. The cut was so bad, and so full of blood, that she rushed to the emergency room. Since Mary was diabetic, and a claw wound was prone to infection, the doctors decided to cut out the torn tissue. The operation cost eight thousand dollars and caught the attention of local animal control officials, but Mary insisted it wasn’t Prissy’s fault. He had never been in a cage; he was scared; he must have, secretly, been angry about that name. A few weeks later, Larry caught Prissy and was scratched so badly, he contemplated going to the hospital, too. But they were sure, as a repeat offender, Prissy would be doomed. So the next day, they put sleeping pills in his food. Somehow, Prissy managed to wander off and hide in the bushes. He must have gotten a fantastic sleep, because Mary Nan and Larry didn’t see him for two days. In the end, twenty-five cats were neutered at Colony Resort. Prissy wasn’t one of them.

With most of the cats neutered, and, thanks to PAWS, fewer feral cats roaming the gorgeous palm-lined streets and sea grass-covered dunes of Sanibel Island, the cat colony at the Colony Resort began to dwindle. Mary Nan’s favorite cat, Chimilee, died of leukemia and was buried beside the screened porch next to Tabitha, the beloved Siamese that had started it all. A striped cat with lips so black they looked drawn on with Magic Marker was buried outside their bathroom window, where he often sat. Two cats were buried by the fountain in the center of the courtyard, which they had always treated as their personal water bowl. Dr. Kimling stopped visiting in the late 1990s, after the death of her husband. Her beloved Gail died soon after, at the age of twelve. She was buried outside the door of number 34, the unit Dr. Kimling had rented every year.

The last cat to live at the Colony Resort was Maira, a direct descendant of Boogie, the dappled gray that Mary Nan had so innocently given a dish of milk almost twenty years before. Maira was always a loner, and even when the cat colony was at its height, she had gravitated to Mary Nan and Larry. Now, with the others gone, Maira moved into the bungalow and deeper into the daily routine of their lives. She wasn’t an overly sentimental cat, but she was always there on the fringes, a shadow that followed them through their busy days. As the years went by, she became quieter, but also sweeter, as if she knew she was the last link to precious days, and that it was her obligation to slowly wind to a close those two decades spent in a joyous, laughing, whirlwind community of fur. She died in 2004, having spent five years in Mary Nan and Larry’s home as the last living member of the beloved cat community of Colony Resort.

Mary Nan and Larry Evans still manage the Colony Resort on the eastern end of Sanibel Island. Most of the longtime guests still come back for their week in paradise, and many of them still talk about the cats that once filled their vacations with such amusement and joy. They are a community, the guests and staff at the Colony Resort, and like any community, they share a catalogue of common experiences. Gail, Boogie, Chimilee, Maira, and the others are still with them, like ancestors or favorite television shows, kept alive in conversations on quiet nights spent under the spell of the star-filled Sanibel Island sky.

It’s not just the Colony Resort. Across Sanibel Island, once overrun with feral felines, the stray cats are gone, like those terrible bombers and their poisonous insect spray. Twenty years ago, when I first started visiting, you couldn’t walk a block without seeing the cats munching on lizards or scrounging scraps at the sidewalk cafés. Now I can drive the length of the island without seeing a single one. Mary Nan knows this is for the best. It’s better for the feral cats, many of whom were ill, scrawny, and struggling for survival. It’s better for the pet cats, who are no longer exposed to the diseases the feral community carried. It’s better for the other animals on Sanibel Island, especially the native animals and birds, so often the victims of a cat’s natural urge to hunt and kill. And if, unfortunately, one of those safer animals is the palm rat, that is a small price to pay to restore the balance of life in paradise.

But still, in her heart, Mary Nan misses them. She misses the eighty pounds of cat that used to sleep on her bed at night. She misses the ritual of feeding and grooming and petting. She misses looking out the window and seeing lounging cats sprawled all the way to the top of a ladder, or lying on the benches in the sunlight with their raccoon friends. She misses seeing them scatter in every direction when the bomber roared overhead. She misses the sight of a door opening and a cat strolling out in violation of all the rules of hygiene and property management. Most of all she misses the comradeship, the sense of being a part of something special as people mixed with cats, and cats mixed with people, and they all enjoyed themselves right down to their bones.

There won’t be any more cats. At least not at the Colony Resort. But Mary Nan and Larry are thinking about retiring and moving back to the mainland, and they’re pretty sure that when they do, they’ll adopt another cat. Larry had always been a dog person, cocker spaniels to be precise, but sharing that Thanksgiving TV dinner with Tabitha in 1969 had changed his opinion of cats forever. He loved Tabitha, and he loved every one of those twenty-eight cats at the Colony Resort every bit as much as Mary Nan had loved them. And like her, he knows that he would enjoy nothing more than to live the last decades of his life in the Florida sun, lounging with a furry friend and remembering those hectic but happy days when the world seemed little more than palm trees and friendship and cats.