Category Archives: Cats

Feline Friday falls on Boxing Day

Well, it’s Boxing Day, December 26, the day after Christmas. It’s also Feline Friday. Which means you’re in luck!

Friends arrived on Sunday bearing gifts for the cats, as well as a few for us, but Santa seems to have driven past our house without stopping this year. But no worries, you don’t have to feel sorry for us. We make reservations to spend a week in Portland in March, but that was about our only significant purchase. I guess the “problem” is that if we need something, we buy it without waiting for a proper “occasion.” So when the occasion arrives, there’s nothing left to give ourselves. A problem, it seems, that isn’t actually a problem.

So, the cats. Kinikini makes a rather ungraceful appearance while cleaning his ample stomach. Kali shows off her transparent ears. And Bessie is caught again with her tongue out.

Just another week in the lives of our Kahala cats!

Feline Friday on Boxing Day

It’s the Feline Friday before Christmas!

We managed to get home Wednesday evening soon after 8 p.m., and the cats were there to greet us.

That gave me a day to get photos for Feline Friday!

And I was handicapped by the weather, which was mostly gray and damp, cutting down the light making its way into the house.

But I managed to made do, and Feline Friday is here pretty much on schedule!

The cats wish you all a merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you celebrate as the winter soltice rolls around.

Feline Friday  • The week before Christmas

Feline Friday just keeps coming around every week!

This was a weird week. While trying to collect enough pictures of our cats for the week’s Feline Friday, I was trying actually preoccupied in setting up the distribution of the first round of my Kahala Morning Dogs 2026 calendars.

I’ve been doing these annual dog calendars featuring the canines we meet on our morning walks for more than 20 years. I’m not exactly sure what year I started, but I’m pretty sure it was before 2005.

Every person with a dog in the year’s calendar gets a gift copy. A few of them order additional copies, but I make them available at cost. After all, they generously let us make friends with their dogs, which we enjoy and appreciate. Giving back in the form of photos has been a nice way to express our appreciation. And to recognize what a fine bunch these Kahala morning dogs are, along with the earlier Kaaawa Morning Dogs.

To make it more complicated, there are now more dogs than will fit in a single calendar, so this year there’s a version 2, dubbed simply (More) Kahala Morning Dogs.

I’ve invited the calendar dogs and their people to stop by our house this morning, or Sunday afternoon, to pick up their calendars. A few are traveling and won’t be able to pick up for a couple of weeks, or perhaps until next month.

But in the midst of arranging calendar distribution, I did manage to get enough pictures of the cats to put together a reasonable Friday display.

Oh, have I mentioned that I’ve switched them largely over to Dental Diet cat food, Science Diet TD, on the advice of our favorite vet, Ann Sakamoto? All of our cats had relatively rough starts, and it shows in their mouths. So far this year, no new extractions. But dental issues are still there, and this crunchy TD diet is supposed to help. Luckily, they like this stuff! It will take a while to determine if they like it too much and start gaining weight. We’ll see.

But, in any case, here come the cats!

Feline Friday-December 5, 2025

Sharing the dream

If you’ve ever lived with an animal that you have later missed dearly, this poem of William Merwin‘s will speak to you, I’m sure.

I don’t remember what led me to it late yesterday afternoon. We were sitting on the back deck. I was fiddling with small things. Checking my calendar for the week, adding reminders, finishing a blog post featuring a letter my dad got from a French surfer back in 1961.

For some reason, I found myself looking at a list of William’s poems on the website of the Merwin Conservancy, a nonprofit created to carry on his legacy of care for the native palm garden he and Paula created in lower Haiku, as well as his legacy of poetry, vision, and caring.

We had became friends sometime in the early 1980s when William’s curiosity about the Kahoolawe protest movement led him to contact me, and the result was several long conversations that eventually led to friendship spanning a number of years.

But that’s all another story. Back to yesterday. I scrolled through the list of his poems, chose one sort of at random, “Dream of Koa Returning.” It turned out an expression of William’s inexhaustible love of his chow chows. They reciprocated, and were very protective of both William and Paula.

I recall the first time we drove to see them on Maui. We parked among the trees, and could see William and one of the dogs in the distance. As we got out of the car, he called out a warning. “Don’t move. Stay very still until I get there,” he said, as he made his way over to introduce us to his dog, and establish that we were part of his family circle and not ones to be defended against. It worked, and we never had any issues with any of his dogs.

We feel about our cats like William felt about his chows. We’re bonded at some essential level.

And so his dream of Koa hit me surprisingly hard.

Sitting on the steps of that cabin
that I had always known
with its porch and gray-painted floorboards
I looked out to the river
flowing beyond the big trees
and all at once you
were just behind me
lying watching me
as you did years ago
and not stirring at all
when I reached back slowly
hoping to touch your long amber fur
and there we stayed without moving
listening to the river
and I wondered whether
it might be a dream
whether you might be a dream
whether we both were a dream
in which neither of us moved