You believe your cat has a favorite spot. You believe it because she has spent two months on the heated blanket in the living room, and you have therefore made certain decisions about how the heated blanket is hers now and how she will always live there, and how the heated blanket may, in retirement, […]

In Southeast Portland, in the small dark hours of a Sunday morning, the smoke alarm went off in a house with a man asleep in it. He did not hear it. The man is a local business owner, the kind of person whose name appears on the front of a small storefront on a street

The first thing Lesa Baird lost in the July 4 floods was her house. The Kerrville home she had lived in for years was inside the flood’s reach when the Guadalupe broke its banks and rewrote the geography of the Texas Hill Country in the worst flood in living memory. Baird got out. The house

Here is the pattern. You are sleeping. The cat walks into the bedroom. The cat stares at you for some number of seconds — anywhere from three to about ninety. The cat leaves. You wake up vaguely aware that someone has been in the room. This happens, on average, three to five times a night.

This is a story we tell on Memorial Day for a reason that nobody puts on the program. So before the picnics and the flags, here it is. His name is Jesse Knott. He was an Army Staff Sergeant on a small forward operating base in Hutal, in a remote part of southern Afghanistan. There

The fire took the house first. In the first week of January, the Palisades Fire moved through Pacific Palisades and put 82-year-old Katherine Kiefer’s home into the past tense. The walls were gone. The roof was gone. The cookbooks and the photographs and the chair by the window were gone. What was also gone, the

A South Florida rescue found a quiet cat in a carrier with a note attached. Five days later, he was on a transport to Buffalo. The woman who took him home had come to look at kittens.

The shipping container she stowed away in left a port in China and didn’t open again for three weeks. In that time, the container crossed an ocean, was lifted off a ship onto a train, and rolled across most of a continent before arriving at a business in Oakdale, Minnesota — about 8,000 miles from

Ten stories. That is how far Mazy, a cat in Boston, fell this week. She is still alive. She is at MSPCA-Angell, the city’s largest animal medical center, in care that is expected to cost upwards of fifteen thousand dollars. There is a phrase the vets use for cats who have fallen from very high

Eight days. That is how long Chleo, a two-year-old gray-and-white cat from New Britain, Connecticut, sat in the top of a tree she could not climb down from. She had gone out through an open window — the way indoor cats sometimes do when a person leaves a screen unlatched for a minute too long.