Wherever we went in France, I was looking for cats. Of course, I found and took photos of quite a few.

This particular one (photo below) was one of my luckiest cat shots, taken as I was strolling down the streets of Auxerre, an absolutely adorable Medieval town in northern Burgundy. Stefano had trotted ahead of me, in fact he had disappeared from my sight, but I wanted to have enough time to take in the charm of Auxerre’s ancient half-timbered houses (if you look carefully at the photo on the right, beyond the 15^th century clock tower, you can make out a half-timbered red house in the background).

So I meandered. Slowly.

I looked up at one point and saw two cats, very much like my own Piccolo and Priscilla (except you would NEVER catch the latter licking the former!), perched on the window sill of a second floor apartment. If I had been walking at Stefano’s quicker pace, I wouldn’t have taken this photo. Incidentally, I was soon joined by other pedestrians, curious to see what I was craning my neck to photograph. Their oohs and aahs of delight mirrored my own.

This episode merely reinforced a feeling I started getting after my diagnosis–that sometimes it’s not a bad idea to slow down in order not to miss even the small things in life.

And so I strolled during the entire vacation…