Keeping Outdoor Cats
by Tom Hewitt Edited by April Jones In the late 90s, as I was finishing up high school, my mother found a stray kitten while on a walk in Gilroy. The kitten didn’t have a collar and was near a busy street. After asking around to see if the kitten had an owner, my mother brought the gray tabby home to become friends with the two cats we already had, Furball and Firefly. As it turned out, Grant (that's what we named her) wanted to be outside nearly all the time, only disturbing us by pawing at the back door when she was hungry. She found an area underneath our pool deck to hide in, and rarely left the backyard. Grant lived a long time—about fifteen years—and only became an…