I have a lovely edition to the household: Felicity the cat.
Regular followers of my blog will be aware of my work with NineLives, the cat charity here in Athens…hence my love of cats. Felicity is not actually from NineLives, she’s from the local vet in my new area, and like most stray cats in Greece, she has a story:
My friend has two cats and a dog. We were taking her cat for his shots and I fell in love with the vets immediately. It’s like a menagerie and homage to all things animal! He has a little garden out the front with random cats wandering around that he has rescued and worked on, Felicity was one of them.
She was a little like “Hopalong Cassidy” with her left back leg trailing behind her. I asked what was wrong:
Hit by a car. I literally stitched and pieced her back together.
I could see that, her body was pretty much plastered up too. But it doesn’t end there:
The vet nursed her back to health, fed her and she looked to be quite comfortable hanging out in his garden (difficult to home her).
She escapes again, hip shattered. I found her in a car park near here. I brought her back and spent hours working on her. She’s OK, but she can’t stay here – what if she tries to get away again?
He called her Felicity.
It sounds like an odd name for a cat, until you learn that in Italian, “Felicity” means “Happiness” and understand that she couldn’t be called anything else.
That was it then. How could I not take the little mite? So today is the start of a new, third life for her. And she staked her claim over the house – hissing at my friend’s two cats and putting them in their place. I just hope we all learn to live harmoniously, and that she brings Happiness to us all.