A couple of months ago, our cat Hoagie went blind. Her eyesight had probably been fading for some time, and some of the tentativeness I had seen in her over the past few years, which I had always interpreted as just physical decline from old age, was probably because she couldn’t see very well. But sometime in November she crossed a threshold into stone blindness, the kind where she doesn’t react when you shine a light right into her eyes. The vet says that she’s otherwise very healthy for a cat somewhere between 14 and 16 years old (we adopted her as an adult and weren’t sure how old she was at the time). Blindness is something that just happens sometimes to older cats: rare, but not unheard of.

I work at home and a lot of my time is spent alone with Hoagie. I’ve always wondered about what goes on in her inscrutable little head, about how she understands her own existence, which we disrupted fairly comprehensively this year by moving from Baltimore, where she had lived with us in the same house since 2003, to Los Angeles. She seemed to take the move in stride. She has always been an indoor cat, and her life has always been fairly limited. She sleeps a lot. She has a set of places where she likes to be – the purple chair, the edge of the tub, the couch, the bed, the ottoman I keep next to my desk for her – and for a few weeks or months one of them will be her favorite, until suddenly it isn’t anymore and she has a new spot. She used to like to chase string or those cat toys where a feather is at the end of an elastic cord, but a few years ago she lost the energy and interest for those. I had worried that, after going blind, her life would become even more restricted and thus unhappy for her. No more chasing a flashlight or laser pointer across the floor, a game she still had enthusiasm for. No more looking out the window or at herself in the mirror, which also seemed to hold her interest sometimes.

There was a new thing she liked to do in our new house. We have this green sectional sofa in the living room right next to the door into the kitchen, and right on the other side of the door is our little stove, and when we would cook, she liked to get up on the back of the sectional and get her nose close to whatever we were making, to get a good whiff. But after she lost her sight, she stopped climbing up so high on things. She would still jump up on couches and chairs, but going up another level now seemed beyond her.

Thus, I was extremely happy today when I started making tomato soup. Heating up tomato soup, more like, I guess; it’s just poured out of a can. Tomato soup is one of her favorite kinds of people food, and before I started cooking it, I put a little on my finger and let her lick it off, something I’ve done for years; I had to wake her up to do it, but she didn’t seem to mind. A few minutes later, I heard a familiar “brrt?”, looked around the corner from the kitchen, and realized she had managed to get herself back up onto the back of the sectional. She was a little wobbly, but she was getting over towards the stove. She wanted to smell that soup as it was cooking. It seems dopey to say this, but I was awful proud of her, and a little inspired. I let her drink some soup out of my bowl when I was done, which I don’t usually but I figured she had earned it.

There’s another new hobby she’s developed since we’ve moved here. Our old home, where Hoagie lived most of her life, was a typical Baltimore rowhouse, very linear, two floors and one room in front of the other on each floor. Our current home is a typical Los Angeles bungalow: square, with a bedroom-bathroom-bedroom row next to a living room-kitchen-utility room row. You can walk through it in a circle, never passing through the same room twice, and that’s something she found fascinating, and every once in a while you’d catch her doing the circuit through the house, like an old greyhound ambling around a ghostly track. She kept doing it after she went blind. She bumps into things along the way, but she still pushes forward and makes the loop.