Yesterday, Rachelle and I went to look at a house in Leslieville.
It was on a street called Craven, which I had never been to before. It’s a narrow, well-shaded street that’s lined on the west side by a ramshackle wooden fence that slopes toward the road. The fence, which did not look like it was long for this world, kept some unknown green space at bay, as well as what appeared to be a universe of cats. Everywhere you looked along this fence, there were cats. Scrambling over, squeezing beneath, or sitting imperiously on the top, there were cats, cats, cats.
The houses that faced the fence were tiny and eccentric. Jammed beside one another, with postage stamp front yards, they tilted and crumbled, the idiosyncrasies of whomever was living there made manifest in the exterior. So different than every other street I was used to seeing in the city, it felt like I had just stepped foot in a completely different realm.
Most of the people who lived in the houses seemed to be out on their front stoops, many with some cat by their feet. Everybody watched as Rachelle and I walked up the street, and it was such an inescapably intimate environment that we fell into conversation with most of them.
A man in a baseball hat and two days worth of stubble on his face drank from a can of Molson Export. At his feet was a cat, BJ.
“Nope, now you don’t want to be touching BJ. He’s got a bit of a temper.”
A woman in her 50’s, who was watering a plant in the next yard, yelled over, “Now BJ, that’s a dirty name, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” said yet another neighbour, “ I had a boyfriend in high school named BJ, and he wasn’t dirty, although I wished he was!”
The cats on Craven are all feral. They come to the houses, claim territory and get fed, but they keep their distance, never entering into the homes. Street smart and wounded in appearance, they dart and leap, emerging from beneath cars and vanishing into hedges.
“That one’s Kit. She won’t let you touch her. I’ve been feeding her for years, and she won’t come into my home. Nope. I keep a little cathouse for her out here, and one out back, and she seems to like them just fine.”
A small woman with long hair, thin wrists and big, startled eyes answered the door of the home we were visiting. She wouldn’t’ make eye contact and spoke in a flat, unvarying whisper. She drifted about the home–practically a ghost, whispering more to herself than to us, as we poked about in the cramped and slanted shack. Eventually she led us out to the backyard, where another man with few teeth sat drinking a can of beer. There were about four cats there. “Oh, this is my oasis,” she breathed, “it’s where I come when I need everything to be alright.” The man sitting in the lawn chair gave us a hard, appraising look before naming off all the patchy cats sitting about, each one also giving us a hard, appraising look.