You know how sometimes you’ll see an old lady walking leisurely down the street and then you’ll see her cat following along ten paces or so behind her? Our cat Åsa is like that. Sort of.

Åsa almost always follows us on walks, but there’s nothing leisurely or companionable about it. She’s a worrier, Åsa is, and she broadcasts her worry loudly. Once we’ve gone past what she deems a safe distance from the house, she starts. Her plaintive moans and wails are clearly feline pleas, “No, no, you’ve gone too far. It’s not too late to turn back.” Most often she reaches a point beyond which she dares not venture farther, and she stops to lie in wait until we pass by again (which means, of course, that we can never take a circuitous route but must instead walk to a certain point then turn around and walk back the same way we came).

This afternoon Tage had a yen to visit his farmor (or “Whoa-whoa,” as he so adorably calls her), so I put him in the stroller, leashed up Asbjørn, and we set off down the street, with Åsa not far behind us. After three or four blocks she started in with her protests and I started in with my futile demands that she just go home. I expected her to stop at the fire station, the halfway point, because there are a bridge and a curve in the road there, both of which seem to unnerve her. She continued on, though, and followed us all the way to Olof’s parents’ house, about three-quarters of a mile from our house.

After the boy, the dog, and I went inside, Åsa stood in the bushes outside the house and yowled for about five minutes before summoning her courage and approaching the open door. After a couple of false starts, she came in and was immediately seduced by a few bits of fish proffered by Whoa-whoa. When she’d eaten her fill she curled up on a chair in the spare room and went to sleep.

She never gets fish around here, and I think when it was time to go home she had half a mind to stay. I wouldn’t be surprised if she started venturing down there on her own, now that she knows what delicacies await her and Grandma and Grandpa’s.