This is Cal. And this is Cal's box.

In 2023 I briefly had a bean membership to Rancho Gordo Beans, and one day, Cal stole my bean box. Cats like boxes, so this wasn't a big surprise, but he didn't just appreciate this box, he seemed to love it. He RESIDED in this box, day in, day out, it was his box, all the time. His box, forever and ever. So we kept it.

Eventually I put his name on it. Then we added Pride stickers. Once, worried about the integrity of the cardboard, I tried to hold the box together with a bunch of rainbow Pride duct tape, but he hated the smell and would just sit and stare at the box, looking distressed. I removed the tape, and he immediately went back in the box.

I write this in July of 2025. He still loves the box. It lives on our dining room table, so when we eat dinner we move it to one of the chairs, which means yes, he often sits and eats dinner with us (assuming we choose to gather - we're a household of introverted hermits and don't usually eat all together more than once or twice a week). Sometimes someone will do a big cleaning and move his box off to one side of the room in a pile of stuff, where he can't get it, and boy will he let us know when this happens. "YOU MUST RESTORE THE BOX," he will say. So we do.

I started taking photos of him and posting them on Mastodon. People seemed to get a kick out of him, and I thought I'd put all the photos here as a sort of shrine to the boy and his box. :)

(One of the photos has Chloe, his sibling, in the box. She never stays long. They don't fight over the box, and Chloe seems to know it's his, but I think she likes to sit in it once in awhile just to demonstrate to her brother that she can - they are very much siblings in this way).