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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

feed the cat! some folk beliefs

Among other items in which the weather and the cat are associated, I may mention that there is in Germany a superstition that if it rains when women have a large wash on hand, it is an infallible sign of spite through the cat being ill-treated. Again there is a German belief that any one who, during his lifetime, may have made cats his enemies, is certain to be accompanied to the grave by storm and rain.
The Dutch have also attributed a rainy wedding-day to the bride's not feeding the cat. In the valleys of the Tyrol, girls who are fond of cats are said always to marry early—an evidence, as has been remarked, that household virtues are appreciated in them by the men.
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From Domestic and fancy cats: a practical treatise on their varieties, breeding management, and diseases, by John Jennings (London and New York: 1901), p. 85.

2 comments:

A few Good Cats said...

Hey, whatever it takes... as long as it leads to the cat being fed, it's all good!

parlance said...

For a while, every funeral I went to resulted in pouring rain. One of my cousins couldn't even be lowered into his grave because of the lashing rain pelting horizontally along the ground and blowing away the people who were holding the coffin.

I don't know how he behaved toward cats in his lifetime, but he was a well-loved doctor. I'm sure he made it to heaven and is now talking to the cats who are there.