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Cats of the Alameda Colony
Sharon Wahl
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other
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In the summer of 2010 we rented a house on Alameda Street, in Tucson. Driving down the alley behind the house, the day we moved in, we saw five kittens. The following spring, these kittens and their mother produced 31 more kittens. 31 kittens! One morning I woke up at dawn and the kittens were in our back yard, climbing the mesquite and palo verde trees, napping on the hammock, chasing each other everywhere, in a pastel early-morning light that made it all look like a fairy tale.
Harlequin was the original mother. The kitten mothers were Powder Blue, Tidbit, Hisser, and Gray Ghost.
Tidbit gave birth in Jonathan's editing studio. We had a film in the Tribeca Film Festival that spring, but Jonathan said if the kittens weren't born by then, he wouldn't go. The kittens came just in time: Ziggy, Ewok, and Bear.
Ewok was adopted by a deaf woman. Bear was adopted by friends who moved with her to Washington, D.C. Ziggy Marley Stardust became Jonathan's studio cat.
So many kittens. Lady Grey, Thomas, Cigarette, Commander Shadow, Marilyn, The Dudes, Tiny Orange, Coco, Shy Kitty. . .
Brother, the brother of the mothers, was an orange cat who was great friends with cream and white Shy Kitty. The two of them walked side by side, leaning into each other, with the tips of their tails intertwined. Really, they did.
Buffalo came to mate with the females, the only male who stayed. Descendent of mountain lions, his headbutts knocked you over. But he always made sure all the others ate first.
They napped in the shade, in the sparse shadows of palo verde, mesquite, and Texas sage. They were the shadow kitties.
They played with rocks. Rocks of a particular shape, round, smooth, almost flat, about three inches in diameter. A cat would lie on its back with a rock on its stomach and attack it, furiously, with all four paws.
In the fall, we caught and spayed or neutered all the cats. All but one, Grey Ghost, who escaped every trap we set for her, and died in childbirth the following spring.
Our third year renting that house, the landlord decided to replace the roof. This took several days, and on one of those days, while the roof was open to the sky, Hisser went in to explore. When the workers finished the job, Hisser was still inside. We knew she was inside because we heard her howling to get out. We called our landlord and told him we wanted to hack a hole in the wall where we thought we heard her. He agreed. We hacked a hole in the wall, but Hisser didn't come out. She was trapped in the attic. So we went into the attic crawlspace, hacked a hole in the insulation, placed bowls of water and tuna next to it, inside a Have-a-heart trap, and we got her. Yay! But within a week, she died. I could speculate, but I don't know what killed her.
Powder Blue, a calico with pale blue eyes, was the colony's High Priestess. When we moved across the street, four years later, we carried her over and showed her the fenced-in patio, the unkempt back yard. She never went back. The others followed.
Our new neighbor complained that the cats pooped in his garden. So we closed them in. We built a wood and chicken-wire enclosure alongside the house, with a chicken-wire tunnel onto our porch.
In summer, the cats took turns napping by the front door. The door wasn't fitted properly into the door frame, and there was a space under it wide enough for the A/C to escape onto the backs of cats pressed against it, two at a time, tail to tail. Kitty A/C, we called it.
That February, a scrawny black cat showed up. We didn't think he was one of ours, one of the two black kittens who'd gone off to conquer their own territories years ago, but he showed up as though he was coming home. He slept alongside the colony enclosure for a week before we let him in, getting beat up each night, his head covered in cuts old and new. Leo was named for Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, one of my childhood mentors, who died that month, on February 27, 2015.
Now, in 2026, there are three cats remaining: three elderly cats, Powder Blue, who came inside of her own volition during the summer of 2017, and is now, at this very moment, sleeping in our bed; and two of her kittens, who live outside, Coco (one of the untouchables) and Shy Kitty (a total lush, who, every morning when we go out to feed her, would rather be petted than eat).
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(Powder Blue)
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When we rented the house on Alameda Street, the landlord asked if we would feed a group of five feral cats he'd been feeding for a couple years. If you feed these cats, he told us, other cats won't come into the yard. Ha! The mother of the five kittens next door knew when we put out food each day, and she taught her kittens where the food was, and her five kittens taught their thirty-one kittens. What surprises me most, thinking back on this time, is how easily, how unquestioningly we accepted responsibility for this large group of creatures. There they were, in our yard. They were hungry. So we fed them. Some we tamed, others, in 16 years, we never touched. One of us was a cat person, one of us preferred dogs. But there they were. We didn't seek them out, they just showed up. We never questioned that they were ours.
Sharon Wahl's collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (Iowa, 2024) won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including Harper's (Readings), The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Wigleaf, JMWW, Harvard Review, and the Florida Review. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is online at sharonwahl.com and @swahl922. "Cats of the Alameda Colony" will surely find a place in her book-in-progress, Character Flaws.
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