Six Cats Distillery is named after the cats that moved in uninvited to my flat one day in the Middle East.  There are many street cats there that have very hard lives trying to find food and remain safe from traffic and stray dogs.  Over time a few of them started visiting the flat.  There was a big orange Tabby that bullied all the other cats.  There was also a very little female who appeared very fat, that found respite from the bully by sleeping on some Toronto Maple Leaf hockey socks in the living room.

One night, a cat fight started up on the patio.  I opened the door to find the orange bully and the little female, who was now quite thin.  I stood between the two, and the female ran inside with something in her mouth.  She ran upstairs, then came back down a minute later.  She went back out while I guarded the door, and 30 seconds later she came back like this.

She made five trips in all, moving her kittens into the bedroom closet.

The were pretty small: here’s a close-up of the most rambunctious of the five, with a toe for scale.

Naming cats was not a priority: “Mother Cat”, “Orange Kitten”, “Dark Orange Head”, “Light Orange Head”, “Spotted Head”, and “Fluffy Kitten” were their names for a few months.  That changed when a 12-year-old French girl in the neighbourhood saw them and told me that the names were stupid.  She named the mother “Sophie”, and the kittens “Berlioz”, “Fluffy”, “Ponio”, “Patapouf”, and “Claire”.

Attempts to have the kittens adopted were not successful, so the kittens and their mother (who was probably less than a year old herself) grew up in the flat.  They learned about the litter box.

They learned about stinky shoes.

And they learned to take life easy.