As you would know if you follow my blog, when I moved from our large four-story house, repleat with our dog, Yum Yum and our two cats, Eris and Fran Ham, I brought Fran Ham with me to live in my small apartment.

Fran Ham is a very lovely cat. She’s big, not unusually so, but enough so that her nickname is “Chonky”.  As you can see from the photo, she is a medium-haired tabby. She wears white stockings and a white dicky but the rest of her is a lovely gray and golden and black coat of distinctive patterns.

She is very affectionate and loves to sit on one’s lap and talks incessantly in kind of a high squeaky chatter, and will follow one anywhere never stopping to take a breath. It seems she has much to report.

She’s very insistent about her meal schedule and lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that breakfast, lunch, 3:00 pm high tea, dinner, and before-bedtime snacks are due. She does this by, instead of her high-pitched conversational tone, she begins to wail quite loudly, walking, one might say insistently, between the refrigerator, her bowl, all the while, circling your legs. She is not to be denied.

When she came to us from a sister of a friend, she had been leash trained and box trained and was strictly an indoor cat. But being the people that we are, we did not deny her access to the outdoors through the cat door from the very beginning. She was well-mannered and came and went at will and never wandered far from the yard.

Though Eris, tiny warrior cat, was brought home first from the Humane Society (in an attempt to clear out the mice in the attic, which she promptly did), Fran Ham wanted to be Top Dog. Right away she started slapping Eris around, hiding and stalking her, jumping out of corners and pouncing from tables causing a terrible racket. Such a cat fight you have never heard.

Fran Ham won. To our chagrin Eris acquiesced. She began to walk along the perimeters of the rooms and gave up her favorite sleeping places and even gave up her food before she was finished. But she never stopped being the warrior kitty. She continued to bring in mostly mice and the occasional large rat that stalked our neighbor’s chicken coops.

Eris is tiny with large green eyes, a pink nose, a pink mouth with long sharp dagger like teeth and has never grown larger than a kitten. Why she gave in to Fran Ham is beyond me. Maybe it was the size differential and that was all.

So now the cats no longer cohabitate. From what I’ve seen and from what Hannah says, Eris is a much happier cat now that she doesn’t have to contend with Fran Ham jumping on her and slapping her and taking her food and bogarting her way into Eris’s favorite sleeping places.

But it was sadly certain that in the first month of living with only me, no other members of the family, and no dog, and no access to the outdoors, that Fran Ham was lonely and not the happy contented cat that she was. And perhaps she also missed tormenting Eris.

At times Franny would lie in my arms and look at me with the most forlorn look in her eyes. But there was naught to do since we were in the same boat, having moved away from home and family. I’m sure she saw that same look on my face.

It’s been over 2 months now and we are slowly adjusting. But curiously, when family comes to visit or when anybody comes into the apartment, Fran goes under the bed and refuses to come out. There’s only one exception and that is if Ancel (geandson) comes over on his own and the two of them greet each other with great affection.

I too, Fran Ham, get misty-eyed after a visit with family. But one thing is certain, that I am glad to have you as my companion. We’ll be fine.