Thankful Thursday: A return home

We rescued BadCat from an alley in Weehawken, NJ in 2000. She was just a kitten then - only a few months old. Scraggly and skinny, she lived in an alley between our house and another with a host of nearly identical black and white siblings. The others were all feral and terrified of people, but one night she was sitting on our steps so I leaned over and picked her up. She cocked her head, bumping the top of it against my cheek and started to instantly purr. I carried her up the steps and she's been with us ever since.

But living the first few months of her life outdoors made an impression on her. She has a bit of a wild streak. She is smart and savvy. And she simply cannot - will not - live the life of an indoor cat. Denied the outdoors, she sits in a window and yowls - loudly and incessantly. Which is why she has been allowed outdoors since we moved to our current house in the 'burbs. Though she is safe from the dangers of a busy city street, she faces others. Primarily fox, but also coyote, and possibly large birds of prey. She knows this. Like I said, she's smart. And each night at dusk she sits at the door anxious to come inside where it is safe and warm.

The day we went to the Pearl Jam concert, Mark left in the afternoon to pick me up. Knowing we would not come home that night, he called and called for her, but she did not come home. He propped open the door on the back porch so she'd have a safe place that night.

When we came home on Wednesday morning, I called for her again, but she was no where to be found. All day long I'd walk outside and call her name. Later, Mark walked the street calling for her. He then got in the car and drove through the neighborhood, calling her name.

It got dark and still nothing.

I made up "Lost Cat" flyers and hung them on our mailbox. I emailed them to everyone I knew in the neighborhood. I prepared to hang them up in town and drop them at the local vet's office the next morning.

I wept.

Then, around 10 p.m., I heard her. The familiar meow and jingle of the bell on her collar. I opened the front door squealing with joy and she sauntered in with a look of "what's all the fuss about?" on her face.

So today, I am happy and thankful that my little BadCat is home. I'm not sure where she was, but I hope she won't go doing that again.



What are you thankful for today?

Curiosity cleaned the cat

Scene: I am sitting at my desk typing on my laptop. The cat is curled up on the desk between my body and the computer, her head gently resting on my forearm. Loaf crawls up into my lap and begins petting the cat. A moment later, the cat stands and stretches, tail in the air, exposing her backside.

Loaf: Mom, what dat?

Me: That is the cat’s butt. That’s where she poops.

Loaf: Oooooh. I touch it?

Me: Oh no! No! Please don’t touch it. It might have some poop on it, so you’d have to wash your hands. Leave it alone.

Loaf: Ooooooh.

::She sits for a moment then gets up and runs down the hall. She returns a moment later with a wad of toilet paper::

You wipe BadCat’s butt? You clean it?

Me: Umm, no, that’s OK, BadCat cleans her own butt.

Loaf: Ooooh.

::She thinks for a second, then places the toilet paper down in front of the cat::

Dere you go, BadCat.

::Runs off to play.::

One down, ????? to go.

Every year at this time, we get a few mice in the house. I’m sure it’s a consequence of choosing to live surrounded by woods and I guess I can't blame them. Cold, burrow in a frost-covered log for the next three months or a nice, warm house with two kids who leave a trail of O's cereal everywhere they go. Hmmmm . . . tough choice.

And like last year, my cat seem to be hopeless at catching them. I see her, sitting with her nose pressed against a grate or sitting like a statue trying to will herself to fit under the refrigerator, but she rarely hits pay dirt.

So, we set our humane traps and every couple of nights we get one and we promptly march it out the door, head waaaaay across the yard, release it and hope it doesn’t find itself back in. (I wish I could play Wild Kingdom and put mini trackers them to see how many actually do find their way back. That could certainly prompt us to reevaluate our catch-and-release strategy.)

But anyway . . . today, while playing outside with the girls, the cat came happily bounding out of the woods from precisely the spot where we deposit the evicted rodents. At a distance, I could see she had something in her mouth. Hoping it wasn’t a bird or a rabbit, I ran toward her.

As she got closer, I could plainly see that it was a dead mouse. I’m willing to bet it’s one of the ones we dumped out that way in the last few days. What makes me think that?

She was extra proud. Prancing around and purring and rolling herself over for a belly scratch I could just imagine her thoughts: And you thought you could escape me. Fool! Now you’ll pay. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

And in my imagination she sounded exactly like Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. Which is no surprise because I’ve seen that about eighty-bazillion times in the last two months.

So I gave her a scratch on the head and left her to her prey. Maybe now that she’s got the taste of it, she’ll work a little harder when she’s inside.

I think my cat is reading my blog

Why? Because she totally caught a mouse last night. I spied her in the kitchen pressed as close to the fridge as possible. Every now and then she'd flatten her belly to the floor like a snake and stab her paw under the fridge.

I thought, "Bah! She'll never get it," and went to bed.

Not five minutes later she's at the foot of my bed meowing a very different meow than normal. Then I hear the bell from her collar tinkle and a soft thump on the floor. More meowing. More tinkling. More thumping. So I turn on the light.

And there is BadCat, tossing the carcass of poor Mr. Mouse into the air.

The thing is? We also caught one in the humane trap Saturday night. Mark drove that one across town and let it go in a field.

So now I'm wondering just how many mice are living in our house?!?! I'm not 100% I want to know, but we will reset the trap tonight. And maybe get ourselves another cat to work the day shift.

Yo! Cat! How about a little help here?

Our mouse is back. Actually, I'm not 100% sure it ever left. It may have just retreated to the attic. A few weeks back I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and as I lay in bed I could hear the faintest scrittch scrittch followed by an even fainter thunk thunk coming from the ceiling above me. It kept me up for at least an hour and the whole time I'm lying there thinking, "you've got to be fucking kidding me? I'm being kept awake by a MOUSE?" I finally fell asleep and have given very little thought to our resident rodent since.

Until tonight when Mark yelled from the kitchen, "I think we still have a mouse."

Me from the living room, "why do you say?"

"Because it's swimming in the dog's water bowl."

Eh?!?

Sure enough, there it was - middle of the water bowl - submerged to it's little neck, desperately trying to gain some traction to propel itself to freedom. And then it did. About .00067 seconds before Mark could slap a newspaper on top of the bowl. And all the while our cat was sleeping soundly in the bedroom, completely oblivious.

So our handy dandy humane mousetrap is loaded up with peanut butter, ready to go. Because Lord knows, we can't count on the cat to catch it.