It all started with a kitten in the window….

It was a warm autumn day, so I had my home office window open during the work day. My office is below grade, so when I look out, I have a view of the treetops outside. If I stand up, I can see the birds that hop around sometimes outside, when lead my indoor cats to chatter at them, hoping to convince them to come in for lunch. But this particular morning, a something else appeared outside my window.

I heard a mewing and spotted him in the window. It’s not uncommon for outdoor and barn cats from the neighboring properties from stopping by to peep in the windows and doors of our house. Heck, it’s not even uncommon for some of those outdoor cats to make their ways inside if they hang around long enough or if they look skinny enough. But this was a tiny kitten.

“Who wants to see the kitten in the window?” I asked my wife and one of my boys who was downstairs. They both wanted to see the kitten in the window, but when I stepped from the back door, I heard a kitten mewing from our windbreak, a thicket of trees at the southern edge of our property some twenty-five yards away. That’s a fast kitten, I thought. He covered those twenty-five yards in the same amount of time that it took me to walk through a short hall and across a den.

So I returned to my office, and the kitten was not in the window. But my family, more interested in the kitten than I was, looked around the corner of the house to discover a kitten there, and a kitten mewling in the wind break. So they summoned me forth to find the cat in the trees, and I found the second kitten

I found the second kitten on a tree trunk about four feet from the ground, wailing for his brother, and I plucked the little black koala cosplayer and brought him to the patio under our deck where my wife and son were pouring the love on the kitten from the window. I knew it was a matter of time.

They were but a few weeks old, so we gave them food and water and attention, so they stayed for the most part inside the fence by our back doors. We were not really in the market for kittens, as we had three indoor cats getting into their senior years. But we had lost a couple of older cats in the preceding months, so our hearts were soft. And although we (by ‘we,’ I mean ‘my beautiful wife’) thought we would have outdoor cats, I knew better.

So one night the kittens did not come when we came onto the patio to say good night, and we staged a quick search for them. They had taken to going outside the fence, and we found them under the truck in our driveway. And they became indoor kittens.

They were so young it was hard to tell if they were little boys or little girls, and we originally thought they were girls, so we named them Cassandra (Cassie) and Desdemona (Desi). However, when we took them into the vet–both kittens in a single cat carrier–he set us aright, and they were renamed Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia (Cisco) and Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (Nico).

And what changes they made to our lives. We had to reorient our household furnishings–when you have toddlers, you move all of your breakables to higher shelves to protect them. But when you have kittens, you move all of your breakables to the lower shelves and hope for the best.

Nico has proven to be a very clever kitten indeed. Although all kittens are curious, Nico has learned to open cabinet doors, desk drawers, and dresser drawers (all the better to climb behind the drawer where it’s nice and dark–what a perfect lair for a genius to make his plans! But that’s going beyond the origin story of Nico and to the adventures of Nico.