My first meeting of Bob, Grace, Mia and the others was through photographs – black and white gorgeously toned images of the colony of cats Dana McNeil had begun to watch over.
These feral cats had become her project on two fronts – first an idea for nurturing of creatures who had walked at different times up a grassy hill from the wild of a wooded area that separated her townhome from a more transient population in a nearby mobile home park. During her developing bond with the cats a second project came to be when she made an artful recording of their presence to share in Barbara Hagen’s Photo IV class at Southeast Community College.
Her journey started in the late spring of 2019 with Grace, a green-eyed tortoiseshell feline she described as shy but sometimes fierce. Captivated, Dana began to take food to the edge of Grace’s woodland habitat. Trust began slowly, and eventually Grace, about a year old, would edge up to the patio for a daily feeding.
“To me, she seemed lost, sometimes aimlessly wandering through my neighborhood,” Dana wrote in the statement that accompanied her photo project.
She seemed to be searching for the humans who had either carelessly or intentionally left her on her own.
Grace couldn’t know and Dana may not have known yet, but their lives were beginning to knit together. Sometimes love between humans and animals – even wilder ones -- happens this way, at first unspoken, communicated with eye contact and subtle body movements.
Dana began researching and learning about feral cats. When Grace showed up with a rounding belly, she decided she would wait for the kittens’ births and their weaning, and then work with the Cat House in Lincoln to trap her and take her to All Feline Hospital to be spayed and vaccinated. The cat would then spend her days in Dana’s garage, acclimating to what would eventually become her home.
It took three weeks, with Dana – who is a ballet dancer – sometimes dancing in her garage studio, hoping to calm the hiding cat with music.
“One morning when I came down to feed her, she started rubbing against my legs, tentatively licking the raspberry jam off my toast when I sat down on the floor, mesmerized by the change.”
And elated.
And over the next few months, Grace learned to accept human love and give it back, with kisses and head butts, lap time and “drooling out of the sheer pleasure of life,” Dana said.
I visited the back patio on a Monday evening in October and was lucky to meet the five in a discrete sort of way. They kept their distance until I went into the house and watched them through a window. But I was thrilled to see them, and also catch a sighting of a gorgeous, curious young fox that wandered in from the woods that night.
I know many of my friends are dog people, but I love the cats and their curiosity, quirkiness, and the way you know they love or at least appreciate you, but in a really indifferent sort of way. Dana has done the cats such a gracious favor, but they can only show their gratitude with the quasi trust they have given for her offer of food and mini shelters on the patio.
Bob and company came around close to the start of the pandemic and unknowingly helped Dana through it, every day becoming part of her life, allowing her to turn away for short times from the worrisome news to which we all were subjected and to be absorbed in caring for them. It became, as Alwyn Moss wrote in “Never Love a Feral Cat,” a form of prayer when life on every level seems devalued.
“I felt I was putting kindness out in the world," Dana said, "at a time when we’ve never seen such unkindness.”
In her wildest dreams, she could not have imagined she would become a caretaker for a family of abandoned and feral cats.
“But our unspoken bond is now a promise I must keep," she said. "For that, my friends, is the price of Grace.”
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