In Hello, Stranger, I’d planned a chapter on hospitality in the animal kingdom — between humans and other animals, but also outside of the human realm altogether. It was going to be called “Feasting with Beasts.” Musk-rats snuggling down with beavers (I think that was in some David Attenborough show years back).
I still think there’s something to be said about this. The foster cats Aslan and Aspen are moving on to Germany this week, and I’m going to miss them. But I’ve been thinking about what it means to open up your life a whole other kind of creature of a whole other species, and how they’ve been negotiating living alongside our human strangeness as well, and somehow welcoming us into their cat-world…