Winston

Winston passed away during the spring of this year, most likely from cancer. He was a large cat, very affectionate but physically incapable of sitting on my lap; when my mom would hold him, he laid stretched from her shoulders to her hips. He entered our household several years ago after the death of an earlier cat, moved from being a stray that we fed into our house proper. Imagine his surprise when we then moved.

Winnie was an affectionate cat, as I said. He had a fear of birds, nurtured by an aggressive mocking bird in the front yard and an equally cranky hummingbird in the back, that led him to fear the pigeons in our new house. He eventually got over that, but it was comical while it lasted. He and I used to play tag in the backyard before he became very ill. He was a fairly literate cat - he knew the word "defenestrate," for example, and even seemed to know that it only applies to windows.

We had him on several different kinds of food toward the end, trying to keep him healthy. For most of his life he just ate whatever was cheapest, however, because he was large and also a stray. The fact that he was a stray left him forever with the belief that food might be cut off at any second, and he would eat an incredible amount. We've never had to ration food for our pets before, but he would eat as much as we would let him. And because he was large, he ate all the more.