Love lessons from cat stories, a change in my blog.   I got way to serious and now.. I write about more important things -cats.. I begin with Garfield since he is the father or grandfather.. of all our cats..

Garfield is a male cat in Greece. Very hard!  In Greece, on our island, cats are not pets, they are farmworkers. They kill poisonous snakes and rats and are necessary for a Greek farm, so they are all over. Every village has it’s unfixed cats working hard to help people survive. Unfixed males are wild, they fight allot and get allot of scars and infections and in fact don’t live long like house cats pets. Unlike Greek people, our cats are pets, we let them inside our house ( unheard of) give them names etc. so.. Garfield came around our house, for our female cats for years. He fought with all our male cats and was a fierce cat, often winning, so.. we hated Garfield, we yelled at him, threw water at him to get him away from our cats. One summer we rented our house and the renters ( a Swiss family with 2 boys) loved Garfield, took him in the house, fed him etc. soo when we got back , we had another cat who we still hated. Ummm another key part of the story is that Garfield was …. The father of most of our cats. The mother .. was Ginette a totally wild female who could not be touched , was very mean, and would get pregnant and leave her kittens when they were about 2 months old on our terrace and that is how we got our favorite cat, Tiger the mother of all our other cats umm. Etc.. so.. this Genette would also turn on the males , bite their neck, etc. when they made love, and all the males had big holes in their neck from her. Garfield was no different, he came with a huge hole, and even though we hated him for fighting with our cats, we gave him medicine took care of him and saved his life.

When our males had all left or died, ….. Garfeild was …. Still here! And more and more friendly, loving etc. Since we had no more males for him to fight with and all his children and grandchildren who we had were fixed females…we took him.. in kind of. We did not let him in the house, (he sprayed) but fed him and …. pet him.. and talked to him and loved him. Each day he would sit on the window, watch us like cat TV and if we ate outside jump on our laps to be pet. Garfield became  my teacher of forgiveness and patience. We hated him, screamed at him,  threw water at him yelled at him for maybe 4 years all the time, every day,  and he came back and loved us  He was waiting until he was the last cat and now.. he is . When we arrived here weeks ago, he had a HUGE hole in his neck again, maybe from Ginette or a snake bite, again we gave him medicine and saved his life and took care of him. This time we thought he would die, but…he is stronger than ever. Thank you Garfeild foe teaching me forgiveness and patience. Can you imagine? We pushed him away for years and he just stayed, and loved us all along.