Three small landlords
We tell people we have three cats. This is legally accurate and materially misleading. Notes on Ezri, Lucy and Molly, and the terms of our tenancy.
We tell people we have three cats. This is legally accurate and materially misleading. The paperwork says we acquired them; the lived reality is that the house has three cats and the cats have staff. We pay the mortgage, but I've long suspected the actual title is held in some older, unwritten registry, and that we're on a rolling lease with conditions that were never disclosed and are enforced absolutely.
Their names are Ezri, Lucy and Molly, and yes, one of those names is from Star Trek, which tells you precisely who was allowed near the adoption paperwork and how the household's naming rights are distributed. I regret nothing. A cat should be named by the most sentimental nerd available, and I was available.
Lucy is mine, or, to state it with the accuracy the situation deserves, I am Lucy's. She made the appointment herself, the way cats do: at some point, by a process I neither witnessed nor consented to, I was selected, and the selection is enforced daily. She follows me between rooms with the unhurried persistence of a security detail. She supervises the desk. She has opinions about the correct hour for me to stop working, and expresses them by arriving, sitting in the exact centre of whatever I'm doing, and waiting with the confidence of someone who has never once lost this negotiation. And here's the thing about being chosen by a cat, the thing dog people never quite believe: the flattery is real because it's conditional. A dog's love is a standing ovation for existing. A cat's affection is earned, on criteria you're never shown, at an interest rate you never learn, and when it's paid out, a warm weight arriving against your leg mid-afternoon for no reason you can identify, it lands like a performance review you somehow passed. I've achieved a few things in my life. Few of them feel as validating as being followed to the kitchen by someone with no obligation to do so.
Ezri and Molly run their own portfolios. Every multi-cat household is secretly a small civilisation, with territories, treaties, a complete political history invisible to the primates who fund it, and ours is no different: there are alliances I can only infer, disputes conducted entirely in glances across a hallway, and an entire economy of sunbeams with rules of tenure I will never be taught. Molly, in particular, operates on a need-to-know basis, and it has been made clear that we do not need to know. I respect it. Somebody in this house should have boundaries.
People ask why cats, and the honest answer is fit. I like company that runs in parallel. A cat is the perfect colleague for the chronically busy: present, warm, entirely uninterested in being entertained, and radiating the specific calm of a creature with a completely clear conscience and no inbox. A cat asleep within arm's reach while you work is the best ambient companionship ever engineered, and it was engineered by nobody, which is somehow typical of cats: their finest product, and they'd want you to know they weren't trying.
They contribute, materially, nothing. They file no taxes, catch the occasional insect with a success rate I've chosen not to chart, and their sole recurring output is fur, distributed with an even-handedness that borders on the algorithmic. And the household would be poorer without them in a way that no spreadsheet will ever capture, which I suppose is the point of most of the good things. The rent arrives as affection, paid irregularly, in a currency they issue and control the exchange rate of.
We consider ourselves lucky tenants. We renew every year. The landlords, so far, seem satisfied, although with Molly it's honestly hard to tell.
Prefer the full experience? Read this essay in the house. Machine-readable: markdown source.