Winter bowls, and the cats no one sees

There’s a colony three streets over. They don’t have names that I know of. But they know the sound of my boots on the gravel, and they wait, just out of sight, until I’ve left and the bowls are still warm.

I’ve never seen all of them at once. I count from paw prints in the snow.

The routine

Every morning, just after seven, I fill four bowls. Wet food in winter — they need the calories. A bit of warm water mixed in, because frozen water bowls help no one. I leave, I don’t linger. They don’t trust lingering.

By the time I come back at five, the bowls are licked clean. Sometimes I see a tail vanish behind the shed. Mostly, I see nothing at all.

That’s okay. They’re not mine to know. They’re mine to feed.

What it costs

A bag of decent wet food, four bowls a day, every day from November to March — it’s not nothing. It’s a real number, and donations make the difference between bowls that stay full and bowls that don’t.

If you’ve ever wondered where your support goes on a quiet Tuesday morning when nobody is posting anything: it’s in those bowls. Right there in the gravel. Already eaten by the time the sun comes up.