As with most of my dogs, most of the cats in my life arrived as adults. I’ve had two experiences with kittens.

The first was when a stray that hung around our neighborhood out in the sticks when I was a teen-ager had a mess of babies under our lawnmower shed. Mama Kitty was sorta smart; she made sure she did it where our dogs couldn’t get at them, only bark with furious impotence—although I maintain that if she’d been really smart she’d have done it under some other shed with no dogs.

I was entranced with the baby kitties. There were five of them and they came in all colors. My mother was (and is) a very hands-off person when it comes to stray animals; she wants them to move along, not hang around forever. But even she felt bad for Mama Kitty, and bought a small bag of food that I was instructed to take out and leave for her for a couple weeks. As soon as my mom saw that Mama was up and exploring, though, the handouts stopped. This explains why my first memory of seeing those teeny kittens up and active was watching them lap up blood from a bunny Mama had killed and dragged home for them. After a few days under the shed looked like a charnel house of assorted ears and tails—and the fleas, oh, my lord. I wore a white shirt one day when I flopped down to watch them, and it came away black when I got up—not from dirt.

I would love to tell you that we did the Hallmark thing and took them all to get scrubbed and spayed and found them homes, but that is not the case. As soon as the kittens got big enough to venture out from under the shed, my mom intervened before the dogs could eat them and packed them and Mama all off somewhere—not sure if it was a shelter or a rescue. I argued that we should keep a couple to keep the rodents down, but she said more strays would be along soon. She was right.

My next experience with kittens was much more benign. A friend of mine when I was in my 20s had a mess of cats on her property and one of them got knocked up. When the kittens were born, my friend ran off to the feed store and recruited me to help with home vaccines. Then she unloaded two of them on me “because they need each other!” I named them Whiskey and Shays after rebellions because I had never been a cat owner and (obviously) did not come from a cat-owning family.

Whiskey was a long-haired black and white lazy boy. He was gorgeous and friendly and dumb as a sack of hammers. As a result, he didn’t last long; he got poisoned when he busted out and got into the neighbor’s rat poison. His sister, a mighty huntress, was much smarter and cautious. She lived to be 9 or 10, when she got diabetes and then we got a bad batch of insulin and didn’t realize until it was too late.

Our next cats showed up as young adults. They are geriatric now, and I suspect that when they go, my cat days will be over.

But I won’t discount the chances for any strays that show up in under my shed.