Andrea Jo DeWerd, Hammie & Misko
I adopted Hammie & Misko a week after I moved to NYC. I was 22 and living alone for the first time in my life, and I knew I wanted kittens. I have always been an animal lover. I had a dog growing up, and my family adopted an adult cat when I was in high school, but he was always really my mom’s cat. I knew I wanted kittens for my first pets that were just mine.
After checking out a few shelters and adoption events in NYC, I ended up with these tiny 3-month-old baby brothers from the same litter that had been found dumped in an empty lot on Long Island.
Now, we have been through 13 years, 5 jobs, 2 apartments, and 1 novel together.
They were wild kittens, climbing my curtains all the way to the top, getting stuck in cabinets, beating each other up at 3 a.m. It took several years for them to mature and calm down. They still fight and beat each other up a lot, and Hammie gets up on top of the fridge or the kitchen cabinets, even at 14 years old now.
Hammie is named after Alexander Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s birthday in January, right before I adopted them. But he’s had the name since long before the musical! Misko is named after a hockey player from Minnesota, which only makes sense to my friends from Minnesota.
As brothers, they look similar from the back. They have the same long body, long legs, and some of the longest tails I’ve seen on cats before. They have the same tabby striped pattern down the spine, and both of them have leopard-like spots in their coats too, among the stripes. Hammie has that white face and paws and belly and that sweet pink nose. Misko has that beautiful tan eyeliner.
Misko has always had a few pounds on Hammie. I think Hammie was maybe the runt of the litter. At 3 months old, Misko was 3.5 pounds, and Hammie was 3. Now Misko tips the scales at 18 pounds, and Hammie is around 12. I feel bad when Misko throws his weight around. He sits on Hammie and bites his ears. I always break it up. Brothers, man. What can you do?
One of my favorite things is our routine. I love how ingrained they are in my daily life. I write in the mornings. I make my coffee and sit in bed with my laptop, and they both curl up next to me for our quiet mornings together. I wrote probably 75% of my first book with my guys next to me. Misko likes to carry his favorite toy duck around and scream at the top of his lungs while I shower. Hammie comes to get me every night for bedtime. He tells me when it’s time to turn the TV off and get ready.
The wildest thing is that Hammie has started predicting my migraines over the last five years. It took a while for me to put it together, but I realized that some days, he was getting very agitated and aggressive, nipping my ankles, and like clockwork, I would have a migraine three hours later. I read about it, and apparently, cats have a heightened sense of smell, and he’s likely smelling some hormonal or other bodily change, even before I start to feel it. I’ve started taking my preventative medicine when he alerts me.
The vet said to my mom once about her cat Napoleon, “I can’t tell you what your cat’s thinking,” and I think about that a lot. Hammie has tried very hard to let me know what he’s thinking.
As they’re getting older, I’m starting to get anxious about dealing with elderly animals and eventually losing them. I know that’s part of the deal with pets, but I’m not ready. I can’t imagine my life without them.
Andrea is a publishing industry veteran, book marketer, and writer in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder of The Future of Agency LLC , and co-founder of Madonna Writing retreats. Her debut novel, What We Sacrifice for Magic, a multigenerational, witchy coming-of-age story, will be published by Alcove Press in fall 2024.