One-Eyed Emma

Emma is one of the five cats I'm sitting for this week. I did my best to capture her beauty, but this is not perfectly clear, as it would be with a flash. She closes here eye when she sees the warning light, keeping this sweet lamp of mischief to herself. This week I've gotten to know her better because it's very hot and the cats are sequestered into an air conditioned half of the apartment and away from her favorite niches.

Emma and her brother were rescued a year or two ago and (if I have the story straight) her right eye was infected at that time. The vet decided it could not be saved, so out it came. She was given her name after the great anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and her brother was named Sasha, after Alexander Berkman, Goldman's comrade and lover.

In anarchist and radical labor circles, the black cat symbolizes direct action. The image is very common, but one of my favorite little features of it is when the cat's ears have little points of fur, or tufts at the ends of its ears. Emma shows us a pair of those here.

I think that Emma makes her surviving eye go a long way.