A to Z Blogging Challenge
We are NOT getting a cat...
Since they were old enough to talk, my kids were asking to have a
cat. "But we already have a dog," I'd tell them. "We want a
cat," they'd respond. So I told them, "If a stray cat adopts us some
day, we'll keep it."
Well, you probably know where this story
is going, don't you?
As much as I love them, we didn't plan on
having cats because much of my family (including me) is allergic. But one cold
night in October 2005, my husband was shutting up the house for the night,
including the garage, and he yelled, "Becky, come out here! I think I just
saw a huge rat run under the car."
Since I'm not afraid of rodents and my
husband would rather walk on cut glass than deal with tiny animals with long
tails, I headed to the garage just in time to see something dart behind one of
the cars.
Then we heard it: a soft, pathetic-sounding meow. And we spotted a
tiny, fluffy gray kitten sitting on our old toy box against the far wall. The
poor thing couldn’t have been much more than a few weeks old. As we picked it
up, another tiny head popped out behind the box. That one was too skittish to
catch.
It was late. Our kids were already asleep and the next day was a
school day so we didn’t want to wake them. We put the gray
kitten into our big
dog crate with water and a blanket—we’d figure out what to do in the morning.
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| V2 and Claire |
The next morning—which happened to be our son’s 10th b-day—we woke
the kids and told them, “Come to the garage and see what Dad caught last night.”
Our son, being a typical boy, hurried downstairs to see. Our daughter held back.
“It’s a giant spider, isn’t it?” she asked, and wouldn’t go to the garage until
she heard her brother calling for her.
They were delighted to see the kitten, and my daughter was able to
coax the other one out of hiding. The kids wanted to stay home from school that
day—“Mom, we just found two kittens AND it’s my birthday!” our son said. Nice
try.
Turns out, someone had dumped an entire litter of kittens (five of
them) in our neighborhood. Four of them found homes (two with us, obviously)
and the fifth cat we could never catch.
That was almost 10 years ago. We still have Claire. Bam (the fluffy gray
one), unfortunately, died a few years ago. But last winter, another young cat
showed up on our porch. Literally. It sat in front of our door, meowing loudly
for days until we finally took it to our vet to have it checked for a
microchip. It had one, but the owners on file denied ever having the cat
(WTF???). We suspect they just locked it out of their house one day, and it
found its way to our neighborhood. We decided to keep her and named her V2 (for
Version 2, because she looks just like
our other cat, Claire).
I don’t expect we’ll get another cat anytime soon. Two is plenty.
But if one just happens to show up on our front porch…
