The most difficult water provides the sweetest drink

When I wondered where Percy hid, I checked one place first. 

The answer was rarely surprising. I only had to pull back the shower curtain, where he would be waiting patiently at the tub faucet. 

Early in our coexistence, I discovered Percy would not tolerate just any water. He frequently jumped onto the counter, not for food, but to lap from the faucet. The bowl on the floor went ignored, even if I replaced it daily. Eventually the tub became a compromise. 

 “Why do you have a bowl of water in the tub?” – I got that question several times. At first it was to give Percy the water he wanted. 

Cats can taste minerals we cannot in water, and those decades-old municipal connections delivered the goods. Thanks goodness I never lived in a new apartment or house; he might have stopped drinking indoors. Eventually I relented and just let the water trickle in the tub. 

Lap it up, fuzzball.

 At least he never drank from the toilet. Otherwise, the dirtier the water, the better. This love of water from progressively dirtier sources might have led him to spurn the clean sources most cats tolerate.

For a brief period in 2015, he had a fountain. That lasted a few weeks, maybe a month . Even when filled with tub water, he never acclimated and went back to standing behind the shower curtain. 

Percy had his own plates and bowls so no one would ever use cutlery or dishes that had held cat food. I kept plates on the patio so he could drink water and not need to come inside on good weather days. The water can filling the plate was a moment of great excitement for Percy. He wouldn't hesitate to speak up when the plate was dry and he didn't feel like going inside for water.

With new cats in the yard, drinking sources were never hard to find. The Crosswood outdoor kittens drank from bowls of leaf-covered rainwater. I would fill those bowls during dry spells, and watch them lap. 

In a strange way, I felt pride at Percy’s discovery of snowmelt. It seemed like a rite of passage for a cat to truly become a Western Kitty. Snowmelt keeps the region from becoming a desert with constant wildfires so we must welcome it. Percy certainly did. 

Plain old dirty water

Snowmelt

In the backyard, The patio pavers slope down near the garage. When snow melts, the water tends to pool there. Percy went straight for those pools whenever they formed. 

In early 2021, a series of brutal snowstorms buried one of my shovels. As the snow melted, the shovel reemerged with a pool of water in its curved blade. So shovel water became the trend for spring, summer and fall. After an epic rainstorm, when the typically parched yard flooded. I stayed on the pavers as Percy leaned over the turgid waters, eager to drink. 

The most common cat drinking alternative, the glass of water left unattended on a table that inevitably spills, did not catch Percy’s attention till his later years. At that point, he had no problem drinking easy water – or just batting the glass off the table. 

Still, these alternate waterholes never overtook the tub. 

Even in his absence, I still leave the shower curtain open. When I finish showering, I hesitate every time, because if I leave the faucet off, Percy might end up waiting.