My Maine Coon picked me. We went to the SPCA to get a cat so the boy we got 1 year prior had a friend. Pepper walked out of the scratch pad in a change in the floor and put her paw in my finger. Great cat. Miss her.

Years ago I had a very large cat who was apparently half Maine Coon, and whose purr could be heard in the next room. Her mother was a purebred sealpoint Himalayan who'd been allowed to roam and who had three kittens apparently from different fathers - one solid black, one solid gray with extra toes, and the smallest one, solid white. I chose the little white one, the very spirited runt of the litter, who grew very fast on a diet of KMR, and who soon began to show pale traces of the fawn color that was her mom's background color, but only on the top of her head and her back and tail. Over the next two years the fawn color was gradually replaced by gray, except for traces of the fawn color bordering the gray on her back near her front legs. Her fur had seemed medium length when she was little. It gradually became very long, especially her ruff and pantaloons and tail, and it included the very long and glossy and water-resistant top hairs that are typical of a Maine Coon's guard coat. She kept growing until she was a few years old, when she was nearly a yard long, weighed 15 pounds, had eyes the size of marbles (her eyes stayed blue), front paws more than twice as wide as my thumbs, and was large enough she scared one of my nieces, then not quite two, who when seeing her for the first time couldn't believe anything that large was really a cat.

She had the loudest purr of any domestic cat I ever encountered. If she was on the couch in the living room, purring, I could hear her in the kitchen, with the dining room between us. I sometimes called her the Mack truck of cats.

My best guess was that her father was a large blue (gray) and white bicolor Maine Coon. When she was full grown I was asked at times if she was a blue (gray) bicolor ragdoll.

She was certainly a surprise as she grew and transformed. Her birthday would have been this week. She shared my life for 17 years, often following me around like a puppy.

She never tried to get into the bathtub, but she didn't mind light rain if she was outdoors. She didn't feel most of it, would just flick an ear occasionally, and when she came in I'd grab handfuls of Kleenex and rub her fur to dry it, and she loved that. She did like to play in water, would often slosh water from her bowl across the kitchen floor. And after I saw her sitting beside the bathroom sink watching my nephew play with toy boats in the bathtub, I'd sometimes let her play with those toy boats in a large basin of water on the floor.

She looked quite a bit like this, but prettier and fluffier, with whiskers that were 4" long.

I keep trying and failing to put it into words. Sometimes it feels as if there is a fellow human in there staring back at you.

She certainly won your heart.😊 Beautiful.

and then your OP reminded me of that loud purr, which is supposed to be typical of Maine Coons.

Huskies are the cats of the dog world