❤️🐾 Caturday Valentine: Bootsie & The Cat Next Door

 

A love story told on four white paws.

Bootsie didn’t start out as anyone’s cat.
He was a friendly neighborhood stray who liked to visit the two little dogs downstairs.
They’d go outside for fresh air, and he’d trot over like,
“Ah, my entourage has arrived.”

One day he simply followed them back inside…
and stayed.
Just like that, the neighbor had a cat she never meant to adopt —
a tabby gentleman with four perfect white feet.
She named him Bootsie, because of course she did.

Life was good.
Bootsie had dogs to supervise, humans to charm, and a whole hillside to patrol.

And then she appeared.

A muted orange tabby — a proper young lady, elegant and self‑possessed — discovered Bootsie.
No one knows how she found him.
Her home was at the bottom of the hill.
Bootsie lived at the top.
But love, as we know, does not care about elevation.

Every day she made the pilgrimage up the hill.
Every day Bootsie came out to greet her.
They played.
They hunted gophers together (because nothing says romance like synchronized pest control).
They lounged in the sun like a tiny feline power couple.

For more than a year, this was their ritual.
A quiet, steadfast courtship.

Then life shifted.

Bootsie’s human became ill and had to move in with relatives.
She took her two little dogs — and Bootsie — with her.
It was the right choice, the safe choice, the loving choice.

But the orange tabby didn’t know that.

And so, every single day since then —
every day for more than a year —
she climbs the hill.
She sits at the door.
She waits for her beloved Bootsie to come out.

When the new occupant steps outside instead,
she rises slowly,
turns,
and walks back down the hill.
Not frantic.
Not angry.
Just… quietly heartbroken.

Because some loves don’t fade.
Some loves keep showing up.

❤️ Valentine’s Caturday Moral

Love doesn’t always look like roses and chocolates.
Sometimes it looks like a little pale orange cat climbing a hill every day,
hoping for one more afternoon with the boy who stole her heart.

Learn more about cats. See our many Caturday posts.

Be entertained. See all our posts about cats.

Be inspired. See posts by and about Sula, parish cat, and her books.

Have a chuckle. Read posts by and about Jeremy Feig's award-winning book (book of the year finalist, Kops-Fetherling Lagacy Award for Humor), How My Cat Made Me a Better Man.

Watch for Luna Norwood's forthcoming book, Raising Happy Cat Families. Now available on preorder at MSI Press Webstore. Use Coupon Code FF25 for 25% discount.

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