Chaco, the city farm cat

Our peak-empire pet.

I’ve had the privilege of sharing my home with a total of four dogs and four cats over the course of my life, though only as many as three pets at one time, and those were all cats. Yes, I realize that still qualifies me for crazy cat-lady status, but my husband was 50 percent to blame.

Of the lot, Chaco is definitely the most entertaining. As the lot includes a poodle who had the odd habit of ‘hanging’ his turds on plants instead of depositing them on the ground like a normal animal, that’s saying quite a bit.

Chaco’s a special breed called a Devon rex, and they’re famously described as “monkeys in cat suits.” The breed has an above-average climbing drive. This is evidenced in Chaco’s need to get to the highest point in any room, consequences be damned. His only health issue is a torn ACL. The vet said we should probably scale back on his Olympic-skiing events.

A cat like this deserves to be spoiled a bit, with faux ‘trees’ he can climb on, of course. As he had the crazy luck to get adopted by a couple of late middle-aged empty nesters, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that he eats an only-raw food diet, enjoys an arsenal of colorful cat toys, and sleeps the day away on a heating pad.

Yeah, he’s all peak-empire, this kitty.

Don’t judge us too harshly on that last one, though—his breed lacks a guard coat, so he’s covered only in short little corkscrew curls of fine down. He gets mighty cold, easily. It’s my enthusiastic duty several times a winter’s day to rub his ears between my thumbs and fingers to warm them. He also likes to set his cold toe beans on my neck till they toast up again. He’s happiest when he’s tucked inside our clothing with us.

The short, curly hair is one of his attributes, though: He’s as close to hypoallergenic as you can get in a cat. Which makes him the only cat that doesn’t trigger an endless slew of reactions in the cat-allergic. I’m greatly thankful for this, especially because he’s the most affectionate, cuddliest cat I’ve ever met.

If you come over to our house, you’re likely to get a ‘kiss’ from Chaco, as his breeder taught him to stick his face right up into yours for a smooch, and we haven’t been able to break him of the habit. (Not that we’ve tried that hard.) He sleeps with us, of course; and he really likes the cleft of my neck between head and shoulder. If that’s not available, he plops right down on my head. On more than one occasion I’ve felt something wet... trickling down my chin... yep. Cat drool.

When we first adopted Chaco, we tried to keep him out of the bedroom in an attempt to ensure a symptom-free night’s rest. But when I was staying in an Airbnb during our lengthy wait to move into our current home back in 2017, Chaco was able to push the double doors open to my bedroom, and there was no keeping him out. He took to it as if to say, There. As it should be.

Speaking of pushing open doors, he can pull them open as well. This is of course not a great trait to have in a cat, especially if you don’t want your trash all over the kitchen.

With his big eyes and ears, he has a bit of an alien look that I find simultaneously adorable and comical. He’s especially goofy during play, and one of these days I promise I’ll capture on camera one of his totally wacked-out ‘gonna git you’ poses. For now, though, you can smile at him basking in a heating vent.

He’s indoor-only because the Devon rex breed is a miniature one, putting him at about a half or even one-third the size of a regular household domestic cat. As much as he likes to think so as he gazes out at the squirrels and rabbits and birds just beyond the window, he wouldn’t be able to tough it out there on his own for very long. I mean, besides that torn ACL, he’s just a lovable goof with delusions of predatory glory.

He wouldn’t be good for the birds anyway; a surprisingly sad number of them succumb to house cats as it is, so we don’t want Chaco contributing to the problem.

Until we can erect a ‘catio,’ or somesuch, Chaco must enjoy the outdoors from the safety of his home. Yeah, you should hear him bemoaning the injustice of the situation if we’re both outside and the windows are open.

For such a small guy, he can really strike a commanding presence. Sometimes, when writing for clients plus this Substack feels like a lot, I can just pretend that Chaco’s the boss.

He can often make it hard to work anyway; he’s sitting on my keyboard right now, in fact, and I had to delete a row of 7s he butt-typed. This is a pretty common thing I’ve seen in other cats, the drive to distract you while you’re working on something important at the computer, but Chaco must be the hammiest. It’s like he knows exactly how to get me to laugh.

When we adopted Chaco in 2016, it was with the express purpose of giving my stepson, Zander, the experience of living with a pet, something that was new to him. I totally believed Chaco was for Zander. But then Zander went off to college, and Anthony and I realized Chaco filled a huge empty nest for us.

There was never any question when we made the decision to move to St. Louis from the Pacific Northwest eight years ago that Chaco would be included in that plan, even though it meant moving him via air flight... and it also meant towing my cat and all his supplies with me through a string of Airbnbs while Anthony readied our old house to sell.

But having Chaco with us was more than worth all that. I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I’ve often preferred the company of my pets to people, and Chaco is no exception. He’s very much a part of the fabric of our lives here at the ‘farmhouse,’ even if he does make it impossible to start seeds indoors (he digs them up) or dry herbs on screens (he treats this as his personal resting spot).

He even watches TV with us in the evenings, though he reacts a bit differently to some of the documentaries than we do.

We’re sure he thinks of us as lumbering, somewhat awkward colony mates, whose strange insistence on sleeping at night and remaining active all day must be tolerated. We try to give him the best life we can, because he puts a smile on our faces every day, giving us that warm, cuddly, interspecies connection.

We all agree that some days, the exact right thing to do is curl up in a blanket and let everything else fall away.