With Every Cat Comes A Story

In 1985 I was working with a group of girls processing freight invoices for the Accounting Department. We were a group of four girls in our twenties and would go out after work to various places to grab a drink and chat. One of the gals had recently moved from the Midwest, along with her three-year-old cat. The cat was currently living mostly in the closet at a friend’s house because she was terrified of the friend’s cats and my coworker was having a tough time finding an apartment that would let her have a cat.

One day she came to work in tears because the friend could no longer shelter her cat. We had just barely finished the paperwork to close on our first house and I had been thinking of getting a pet so I offered to adopt her cat. We rushed over to the friend’s house, got the surprised cat into a carrier and all three moved in together.  When we let her out of the carrier she was nervous and wouldn’t let us come near her. It took awhile for her to warm up to us but eventually she came to totally dote on my husband, snoozing away in his lap while we watched TV at night, and in her senior years when her sight was going and she wanted to come to bed with us she would stand in the hallway and call (kind of a little yowl) and I would call her name, and so on down the hall until she hopped up into our bed. She lived with us for fifteen years and passed away from old age.

It was a little over a year later when I realized the house was just too quiet and I missed having some furry company. So we headed up to the local Humane Society with the idea we would get an older cat.  In the cat section almost all the cats were asleep. One, however, was not only awake, but had her nose up against the cage door ready to be sprung from her confinement. At first glance she kind of resembled our lost cat, being fairly large and grey. She was younger than I had hoped for, her age estimated to be about two and she had been turned into the shelter about three weeks ago when found foraging for food in garbage cans in mid December. We looked each other in the eyes and I decided this was my cat. Upon closer inspection she turned out not to be a grey tabby but a “diluted” tortoiseshell, with one beautiful crème colored front paw, as if she had dipped it in a latte. Released from the carrier, she ran eagerly from room to room and back to us to rub against both our legs as if to say “thank you” for springing her from the joint.

Around a year later I noticed a small white cat hanging out in the front yard. She looked pretty skinny so I started giving her some food before I left for work in the morning. After a short time she would eat and then insist on sitting on my lap on the front porch, purring until I had to get up and go. As the weeks went on she would spend the day sleeping under the next door neighbor’s RV in her driveway and when I came home from work she would run as fast as her little legs would go down the sidewalk to greet me. When November came I set up a little box with a few towels in it to try to keep her warm during the colder nights. Then I moved her into the garage and set up as warm as a place for her as I could. The Humane Society had insisted that the cat we adopted did not get along with other cats so I wasn’t actually planning on bringing her into the house. One really cold night I moved her from the garage into a spare bedroom with the door closed. Cat No. 1 took to hanging out in front of that closed door with the expression “what the heck do you have in there?” on her face. When my sister came to visit for Christmas, she took charge and opened the door (I could barely watch, sure disaster was about to ensue) and there was some chasing around and hissing, but eventually they settled into a bond of mutual tolerance and get along pretty well.

A couple of years went by and one day I noticed a big grey and white cat hanging out on the fence when I was out in the garden. As the days went by I’d go out to water the plants and the cat would come along to hang out with me and be petted. I knew most of the closer neighbors well enough to know their pets but there was a renter who lived behind us and I assumed she was his cat. One day I received a flyer to attend a neighborhood meeting. When I went to the meeting I learned that the renter who lived behind us was actually a drug dealer about to be evicted. I started leaving out some food for the cat in case the renter couldn’t take her with him when he was forced to leave. The time came for the renter to move out and the cat stayed on. At this point I was pretty sure she had no permanent home so I kept feeding her, putting a dish out on my back porch in the early morning when I fed my other cats indoors. One early winter morning when I went to put the dish on the porch, out of the darkness came charging at me a huge (about three times the size of a normal cat) furry thing. I threw first one shoe and then the other at it but it kept on charging. I hurried back inside and got a pan and big ladle type spoon and banged the pot loudly as I went out onto the porch. As I kept banging the furry monster retreated up the tree and back over the fence out of our yard. I called for the cat, grabbed her and put her into the spare room with the door closed. I later learned the monster was a raccoon when my next-door neighbor knocked on my door to borrow a cup of cat food to lure the raccoon into the trap she had set for him. He had moved in under her deck and was raiding her shallow fishpond. She has tried to lure the raccoon numerous times into the trap just to find he has eaten the bait all the way up to the trap door or even picked up the trap and shaken it to dump the food out. Cat No. 3, meanwhile, now lives in a “bed and breakfast” room as I no longer feed her outside and she spends the night indoors.