A riddle for you: when are the so-called givers the true receivers?

Answer: every day, every hour, every minute at Tabby’s Place.

Also: every time we warm ourselves at the bonfire named Wooderson.

Dear sponsors, you know better than anyone who’s really doing the saving here. For all our labors of love, it’s the cats — the hopeless, the lonely, the lowly, the little — who heal our ragamuffin hearts. They need us, but it’s an open secret that we need them even more.

Fortunately, felis catus is a particularly generous species.

I’ve been at Tabby’s Place nearly sixteen years now, but this lesson hits like a revelation with each new cat. We rescue a weary wanderer, only to find that the whole world around us is safer and sweeter. We give our love, only to meet our match in a long-tailed lover who runs rings (or tabby stripes, as the case may be) around our efforts.

We pour out our energy, our generosity, our joy and our grief, only to find that our cup overflows. We are tycoons in the typhoon of tenderness.

Which brings me to one woolly little wizard named Wooderson.

By all accounts, Wooderson needed us. Limping through a feral colony with an injured paw, the bushy, bearded boy was a gnome in need of a home. Left to his own devices, Wooderson’s future was bleak indeed.

But Wooderson was about to become a Tabby’s Place cat. And the day you put on that title, it doesn’t matter whether you’re feral or smooshy, jaded or jaunty. You’re ours, you’re loved, and you will have everything you need to thrive.

Wooderson arrived uncertain of his place under the sky. People had been kind to him in his colony, but kisses and cuddles were scary to contemplate. People were doing painful things to his paw, but afterwards he felt so much better. People were looking at him like he was the sunrise itself, and a guy could kind of get used to that.

People were looking like the future Wooderson never knew he always wanted.

Meanwhile, we were all looking at Wooderson like children seeing Santa in person for the first time.

To gaze upon our grizzled gnome is to be smitten; to gaze upon him often is to turn into a perpetual puddle of sentimental goo. Wooderson is simply that improbably adorable, that incurably good-hearted, that bashfully brilliant in every way.

Yes, I am over the moon.

As his fluffy foot healed, Wooderson’s fuzzy thoughts cleared. It was all too obvious that his sappy new friends were a needy bunch. He would simply have to stick around and glue them back together with his gentleness. Outdoor life was over. It was time to take care of humans.

Humans — thanks to you, generous sponsors — had saved Wooderson’s life. (We had also awarded him a name that no one can quite explain. Is it the last name of a Law and Order star spoken in a Philadelphia accent? Is it a nod to his outdoor past? Is it proof that he is, in fact, part woodland creature, more mystical than the average cat?)

Humans had filled Wooderson’s days with good things — health, and patient hugs, and the radiant revelation that is squeeze-poultry.

Humans had rewritten Wooderson’s sad story. But now the pen was in Wooderson’s hairy, healed paw, and he knew what to do.

He’s writing us love letters with his life.

We’re bracing ourselves for the day one lands in an adopter’s mailbox.

But until then, we’re receiving the gift of Wooderson every day, every hour, every minute.

It’s a cosmic thing that happens when you give with joy.

Beloved sponsors, thank you for giving with all your hearts.

Love, your correspondent,
Angela