My Stray Cat Friend: Marmalade
2025-11-22 22:02 - General
Back in early June I was reading a book on the porch. At some point, a cat wandered into the yard. Thanks to another cat I had run into a few times not long before (this a lost cat, chipped, returned to owner via county shelter) I had some cat food on hand. I popped inside and made up a bowl of food and was happy to see that the cat was still around when I came back out. I scared it away as I approached to set the bowl down.
Luckily again it didn't run too far away. I retreated and watched, and it came back and ate some food. From that point forward I fed it very often, usually just leaving food out to be available. I definitely saw a bunch of birds going at it now and again. The cat very slowly grew more comfortable around me. Eventually I could start guessing when it would be around; at first if I just barely opened the door it would immediately run away. Then it would just retreat to the far side of the porch. Then it didn't even retreat very much.
It's orange and white. As you can see in the first photo (from the very first day we met) it's got an issue with its face/eyes. There's usually some bloody seeming goop at the corners of the eyes. The second more recent picture shows that it sometimes manages to clean itself up pretty well, though. At first I had assumed the face was injured, some sort of battle scar. I'm less confident of that now.
For some time now, and definitely almost every day this month, it's been sitting on the porch waiting for me in the morning and I've been giving it breakfast. Very slowly and carefully (over the course of months) I managed to get it to accept some gentle petting. Before long after that it even responded to pets by turning around and rubbing up against me. These days I easily spend ten or fifteen minutes hanging out in the morning and even get to hear a little bit of a purr now and again.
Somewhere in here I decided to give the cat a name. I don't feel very creative so I decided to use an AI to help. I provided a description and asked for a long whimsical name. Among the options that came back was: Captain Marmalade Farsight. So that's the name, though in practice it's just "Marmalade".
Final note: it took until quite recently while Marmalade was comfortable being close, but now I'm pretty sure this is a TNR community cat. It's more subtle than the example pictures I find online and always possible that it's actually an injury, but I see one normal ear and one that's more truncated along a suspiciously flat line.
Either way Marmalade has become a nice friend.
