For a brief period of time I lived in a very tiny town in southern Virginia (the county was right on the line with NC). I rented a small house and moved in with Peter, my 18-pound indoor-outdoor cat. Peter was used to the outdoors but not to very tall trees— in that part of Virginia the main industries were tobacco and pine trees. One Friday afternoon Peter climbed a pine tree and could not get down. I left him up there overnight and then called the volunteer fire department. They got him down (he peed on the fireman, too), and after that I tired keeping him tied on a long lead. But he got away one day and spent the better part of a weekend in a tree again. Again, the fire department got him down for me. Some weeks later, I was in the country seat, a good 10 or 15 miles away (they had an A&P grocery, but nothing big-cityish like a movie theater) buying something at the hardware store. I wrote a check, and asked the clerk if she needed to see my license. She looked at the check, saw my PO box address, and asked where I lived. When I gave her my landlady's name, she said, "Oh, you're the girl with the cat."

You know you're in a small town when a cat up a tree is a cause for excitement.

He looks petrified but also a little proud.

Senile!cat, in her younger days, would scamper off my second-floor balcony down the exterior stucco wall of our condo building in Key West, and then go scamper in the swamp. In Connecticut she got off the balcony and up a tree for 24 hours. I actually asked a sailor to come help me get her down, but that wasn't successful...she eventually got down just fine on her own.

Glad to hear Phineas made it down on his own without intervention!

I had a cat when I was growing up who would run full tilt at the very large tree in our yard and make it about halfway up before she realized what she was doing. It always seemed a great shock to her when she discovered herself halfway up a tree. She would freeze, look around in a mild panic, then lacking any better solution, withdraw her claws all at once and let herself fall. Suffice it to say, I don't think she terribly bright.

Your cats are beautiful!