Our cat is old enough to drink. Shadow turned 21 this year. For 21 years she has shared our king size bed. Not that we required a king size bed to keep her. Like most tortoiseshell cats she is on the small side. The mutation also means most torties are female. I just think they look cool. In my lifetime I’ve had three. Shadow came to us with a litter of feral kittens born in a pile of brush outside our shed. We watched them from our kitchen window after they were born. I called Shadow Stripe for a while, after the nasty little Gremlin from the movie, Gremlins. She has a prominent orange stripe in between her eyes. We started feeding the feral family, and when the kittens were old enough, we put out a live animal trap. We caught the kittens, one at a time, and then caught the momma and took her to the vet to have here fixed. We split the cost with our neighbors, who already had a cat from one of her previous litters. Shadow got her name because for some time after we brought her inside, we didn’t actually see her. She would eat and drink and use the litter box, but always hide afterward. Then, one day I went into her room and heard her meowing. She had managed to get stuck inside a dresser drawer. Shadow has always had a delicate stomach, but when she started losing weight in her later years, we came up with the idea of grinding fine her dry cat food in a coffee grinder. Good thing I don’t buy coffee beans.