Commentary

A cat’s ‘spice of life’

October 15, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Keith Schell

They say, “Variety is the spice of life,” and that’s very true.

Sampling foods from different cultures makes eating that much more interesting. Travelling abroad, if you can afford to, can be very enriching to the human spirit. But with the way the world is nowadays, if you still want to travel, the very least you can do is try to travel within your own country and enjoy the variety of experiences that exist in your own backyard, if you are so inclined.

Variety to a human is one thing, but variety to a cat is something else altogether. Aside from the different types of food you could feed it, variety to a cat usually means one thing:

Laps.

Variety to a cat is a lap they haven’t yet had the pleasure of sitting in.

Having had our childhood cat for twenty years, she had sat in all our family laps thousands of times. She knew every crease and fold, every bulge and sag, every square millimetre of our laps, and because of that familiarity, the magic was gone. It was the “same-old-same-old” in terms of laps all the time. The bloom was off the “lap rose,” you could say.

So, whenever we had a visitor to our home back then, it was a golden opportunity for our cat to enjoy her own “spice of life”:

She had a brand-new lap to sit in!

It didn’t matter whether you liked cats or not. The moment you sat down on the couch, your lap was fair game for our cat to jump into and sit in.

Because you were in our home and sitting on our couch, our cat would usually walk over to you, hop up on you, and use the opportunity to give your lap a “test sit,” so to speak.

Not that we ever had that many visitors, but the ones we did get usually received the full “lap cat” experience whenever they came into our home.

When any of our friends stopped in to visit, the first thing our cat did when they sat down on the couch to chat was jump up into their laps, settle down, and fall asleep. Our friends usually didn’t mind at all. They’d give the cat a pat and a good scratch, and everything was fine.

When my youngest brother brought his future wife home to meet the family and the two of them sat down on the living room couch, the first thing our cat did was hop up into the girl’s lap and fall asleep there while being petted and scratched. My mother even took a picture of the three of them sitting together on the couch (my brother, his girlfriend, and our cat on her lap). Hey, if you’re going to be a part of this family, you’d better get used to your lap being sat in by our cat. If our cat likes you, then we like you too.

In a way, it was a badge of acceptance for a visitor to have our cat jump into their lap when they came into our house. Our pets were always part of the family and usually felt so loved and secure with us that they were able to be themselves and display their own unique personality traits. And that always made them even more endearing to us (and sometimes more aggravating).

So, if someone’s cat jumps into your lap and settles down while you’re in their home, take it as the compliment it is and give the cat a pat and a good scratch behind the ear.

And let their cat enjoy its own version of a cat’s “spice of life”:

Sitting in a brand-new lap!

Readers Comments (0)