A letter from a reader

At 63, I had spent six years with the rescue cats and kept every last one of them out of my own house

Most of what I write these days goes on the little index cards we clip to the crate doors on adoption day, a name and an age and whether he minds dogs, and I still have to start over when I spell Marmalade wrong. I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman how she ought to keep her house.

But three different women asked me about my laundry basket at the cat rescue's adoption Saturday out at the old feed store in Bellville, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

My friend Jolene from church moved out to Bellville when she retired and started a little cat rescue out of her back porch, the way some women take up quilting. Once a month the feed store lets her set up a table and a row of crates by the big front doors, and once a month for six years I have driven out from Austin to help. In between, I take the rescue's towels and blankets home and wash them, because Jolene's washer is older than some of the volunteers.

This summer Jolene came to stay with us for a weekend, and on the Sunday she walked slowly through my whole house with her coffee, and then she stood in the kitchen and said it.

Peggy, you have held more cats than anybody in Austin County, and there is not one in your whole house.

I laughed, and then I looked around properly, and she was right. Not a picture, not a cushion, not a mug. I had kept all of it out on purpose. I love those cats more than I can tell you, and I had quietly decided that a woman my age with a cat on every surface is a woman people start to feel sorry for.

I did not decide to hide the thing I love. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody sits down and chooses that. It happens one sensible purchase at a time, until a friend stands in your kitchen and says it out loud.

How it happens

When I was a girl we had a big orange tom named Rusty who slept on the foot of my bed for fourteen years, and my mother kept a framed cross-stitch of him in the hall until the day she sold the house.

What changed was not me. It was what they sell us.

Go and look. Anything with a cat on it is made for a twelve-year-old or a joke. Googly eyes, cartoon kittens, a pun about naps. So you have two choices. You fill your house with that and become the cat lady everybody is very kind to at church. Or you keep it all out and buy the plain thing.

So I bought the plain thing. For six years the rescue's clean towels rode out to Bellville in a cracked white plastic hamper that slid around the back seat for ninety miles and lost another chip off the handle every trip. Nobody said anything about it, because everybody at a cat rescue is kind. That is the trouble.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought I had to pick. Either I let the cats in and the house went a little bit silly, or I kept them out and it stayed grown-up. One or the other.

It turns out that was never the choice.

Jolene showed me. Before she drove home she pulled up a picture on her phone of the basket that sits beside her own reading chair, full of library books and the throw she naps under. A soft quilted thing in cream with two cats asleep on a stack of books, and a whole row of book spines around the bottom. It did not look like a cat lady's anything. It looked like something you would keep. I ordered mine that evening, before I had even rinsed out her coffee cup.

The basket is called the Poppy

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly looking after women our age for a few years now.

The basket is called the Poppy. A soft quilted basket in cream, with a ginger cat and a black cat stretched out asleep on a stack of books, a whole row of colorful book spines running around the bottom in teal and plum and red, and little wildflowers and butterflies tucked in between. The picture goes all the way around, so there is no wrong way to set it down.

It stands up on its own, empty or full, which sounds like nothing until you have spent years chasing a tipped-over hamper around the back seat. It has two soft handles, one on each side, so you can carry it out in front of you with both hands. And when you are done with it, it folds down flat.

Nothing complicated about any of it. Just a cat that somebody drew for a grown woman.

What happened at adoption day

I filled it Friday night with a month of the rescue's towels and fleece blankets, folded the way Jolene likes them, and it rode the whole way out on 290 standing straight up on the back seat. At the feed store I carried it in from the gravel lot in one trip, by the two handles, while the others were still wrestling crates out of their trunks.

The first woman asked me about it before we had the tablecloth on, a retired schoolteacher who volunteers on the second Saturdays. The second was a young woman who came in to adopt a kitten and wanted to know, quite seriously, whether the basket came with the cat. And then there was Winona.

Winona has run that feed store for thirty years, and in six years she has never said one word to me except that the loading dock is around back. She stopped on the porch with a sack of chicken scratch on her shoulder, looked down at it, and said, Peggy, that is the first thing anybody has carried in here all year that I wanted to take home, and I am counting the cats. From Winona, that is practically a hug.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I did not tuck it under the table. It sat out beside the crates all morning with the clean blankets in it, and three of the cats went home that day wrapped in one of them.

When I got home Saturday night I did not put it back in the laundry room. It sits beside my reading chair now with the throw blanket and whatever I am in the middle of, and Frank has started calling the black one Jolene, which she does not know yet. That is the rarest sort of basket. The one that does the hauling, and still looks like it belongs next to your good chair.

Three things I have learned since

One. Standing up on its own matters more than you think. It keeps its shape whether it is full or half empty, so filling it is a one-handed job, and it does not fold over on itself on the back seat or in the corner of the room.

Two. The handles change where it goes. They let you carry it out in front of you, across a gravel lot, down a hallway, or from the dryer to the chair. The old hamper never once went anywhere but the laundry room.

Three. Pick your size. The small is 14 by 18 inches and is lovely beside a chair or in a bathroom. The medium is 16 by 22, which is the one I took, and it held a month of towels and blankets for the rescue. The large is 20 by 28, for a family's worth of laundry or all the spare bedding. I would measure the spot before you order.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Poppy is $54.95 for the small. It was $110.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have seen quilted things at the craft fair with half as much going on in them sell for a great deal more than that.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on right now.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman from Burton had written, “Mine was meant for towels and now it holds my knitting by the sofa. My granddaughter has named both cats.”

Then I ordered a second one for Jolene, because she had sent me to it in the first place. She already had the cats, so she picked another design. They do over forty of them, so there is something for everybody.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on that feed store porch with a paper cup of coffee before the doors opened, this is what I would say.

If there is something you love, cats or birds or books or your grandmother's roses, and you have quietly kept it out of your own house because you were afraid of what people might call you, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a laundry basket will change your life. It will not. But there is something in walking into your own living room and seeing the thing you love sitting there in plain view that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on right now, and the medium is the size most of the rescue ladies went for, so I would not leave it too long. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

Six years at the rescue, and there are finally two cats in my house. Neither one of them sheds.

Peggy