The box had once held printer paper. Somebody had cut air holes in the lid with a kitchen knife and set it on the step outside the clinic in Coon Rapids before we opened, on a cold morning in April 2017. I was the first one in, and when I bent down to move it out of the doorway, it mewed at me.
Inside was a gray tabby kitten small enough to sit in my palm, about six weeks old by the vet's guess, with enormous ears and very strong opinions about being picked up. I said I'd take her home for the weekend while we figured something out. I'm sure you can guess how that went.
We later worked backward from that six-week estimate and gave her a birthday of March 1, which means Mabel turned eight a couple of weeks ago. She weighs 10.4 pounds, she has never been outside on purpose, and she runs this house.
She sets the schedule
Mabel's day starts at 5:30 a.m., when she sits on the stairs outside our bedroom and meows. Not a loud meow. One flat, patient note every thirty seconds or so, repeated until someone comes down. She is fed first, always: a small scoop of Hill's Science Diet Adult 7+ and half of her daily 3-ounce can of Fancy Feast Classic pâté, with the other half at dinner. Only after she has eaten does Hank get his breakfast. He figured out the order within a week of moving in and has never once argued with it.
Mid-morning she moves to the radiator shelf Caleb built in 2023, a long wooden cover with a top wide enough for a cat to stretch out on. In winter it's the warmest seat in the house, and she knows exactly when the boiler cycles on. Afternoons are for the dining room window, where she watches the chickadees at the feeder and makes a stuttering little chirp that I've never heard her make for anything else. Evenings are for Caleb's lap.
She picks the chairs
The reading chair by the bookshelves is hers. So is the end of the gray sofa closest to the radiator, the second dining chair from the window and, at night, the exact middle of the foot of our bed. If you sit in one of her spots, she doesn't fuss. She sits on the floor directly in front of you and looks at you until you move, and you will move.
Caleb came along after Mabel did, and for the first month she treated him like a delivery man who had stayed too long. Then one night she climbed into his lap during a hockey game and that was that. He now refers to her as "the boss" and means it.
She supervises the dog
When Hank arrived in October 2021, we kept them apart with a baby gate for a week. On day three, he put his nose through the gate, and she swatted it once, no claws, and walked away. That single swat set the terms for the next three and a half years.
These days she supervises nearly everything he does. She sits on a kitchen chair during his meals to make sure he doesn't get anything she didn't. She watches his nail trims from the third stair. When he comes in from the backyard, she checks his paws from a safe distance, as if she's the one who'll have to mop. If they meet in the narrow hallway, he stops and lets her pass. He outweighs her by almost 58 pounds, and he still waits.
She isn't mean to him, exactly. Once in a while, when the radiators are going and the house is quiet, I'll find her asleep on the rug a few inches from his back. If I reach for my phone to take a picture, she wakes up and leaves, because she has a reputation to protect.
Eight is a number now
At her last checkup our vet started using the word "senior," which Mabel would object to if she knew. Nothing is wrong. She's just at the age where her care will start to shift a little, and I'll write about that as it happens, because senior-cat costs are a whole category of their own.
For now she's on the radiator shelf with her eyes half closed and one paw hanging over the edge. Hank is lying in the doorway, carefully not looking at that shelf. In three and a half years he has never once tried for it.
