Picture it, a beautiful Saturday in spring of 2004.  We were in the backyard and I looked down at one of our cats and heard a meow at the same time.  I told John, “hey look, Norma can throw her voice.  She just meowed but her lips didn’t move.”  John said “that wasn’t Norma, that was a kitten”.  We listened carefully and from outside our fenceline, in a 20 foot tall crepe myrtle tree, right on the side of the road, was another meow.  John started running toward the fence, I ran into the house to get a towel. John jumped the fence and grabbed this little torti girl.  She was so little and scared and hungry.  We were picking dewberries that day so I wrapped her up in a piece of fabric and tied the fabric around my shoulder and she hung there on my chest for the rest of the day while we picked berries.  She slept so hard.  I’m sure it was the first time in her life that she could sleep and not be afraid of something getting her.

On Monday morning, John was leaving for work at 6:30; it was still dark. As he stepped out onto the front porch, he called to me to get a towel (I know what that means now).  The torti’s little sister was eating out of the bowl that we have on the front porch for the feral kitty.  John picked that little girl up and she was just as scared and hungry as her sister had been two days earlier.  

Both of these little girls had ringworm and internal parasites.  But other than those two ailments and being underweight, they were in good health and rebounded quickly.  We named them Half-n-Half and GeeGee (for Gray Girl).  We quickly determined that these two were not going to be easy to find homes for.  They were just barely on the tame side of feral.  Neither of them liked to be held and they prefer the company of other cats much more so than that of us humans.  Both girls are still with us.  GeeGee rarely talks, but Halfy gets to playing by herself each morning and has the best squeaky voice we have ever heard.    We are of the opinion that our feral, The Gray Ghost, is the dad of these two.  He and GeeGee have the same face.  And when The Ghost comes up at night to eat, GeeGee and Halfy are the only two cats in the house that start pawing at the glass door.
We think they remember him.