I moved out to our tiny house (it’s a doublewide but tiny house sounds classier to some people) in the wilderness in May, emptying our house in town so it could be sold…. sigh. It’s a sluggish market and the house is STILL for sale.
But I have zippo regrets about moving into the county. The birds wake me in the morning and the frogs sing me to sleep at night. It’s cool in summer. It’s easy to keep clean. It’s hard to reach so only people who really like me come out here.
I brought the two cats out, of course. Molly our mouser took to it immediately and within a day was running around under the trailer’s skirt taking care of business. O’Carolan, our blind cat, located her diner and litterbox, then found her comfy rug and settled in for a stress-reducing nap. Later I showed her the home’s three porches and doors so she could acclimate in case she wanted to sun herself outside.
Which is probably how it happened. I was gone for a few hours, and when I returned, O’Carolan was not in the house. The front porch cat flap doesn’t have a door in it, so if she made it to the porch and something startled her, she could technically get out. My guess is the shaggy dog from down the way who seems to be a communal pet came just as she was sunning on the porch.
The ironic thing was that I saw her as I crossed the last stream (there are four) to reach my house, and she ran in panic from the sound of my truck hitting the water where she had been drinking. I just didn’t have any reason to think it was O’Carolan then.
Once I realized she was missing, I was back at the Last Known Location within five minutes, banging wet cat food cans together and calling “brekkies! supper!” etc. Nothing.
Two days of nothing. Well, two days of walking up mountains and along streams and through other people’s property, calling “O’Carolan” and rattling a food bag. The neighbors here want privacy. When I crossed one lot and saw a dog house the size of my front porch–with no dog in it–I figured I would meet him shortly and that was how I would die.
Two days of bargaining with God, then railing at God, crying over the sufferings a blind cat would endure in heat, in cold, in a woodland filled with creatures. A full day of despair. I got caught in a thunderstorm at the top of a steep mountain and literally slid down rocks on my butt. I found two abandoned houses in the wood. I found a thousand bags of high-end potting soil abandoned in the woods. (These were later redistributed.)
I did not find O’Carolan. I “knew in my spirit” that she had died horribly. And then my friend Amelia texted, “Have you told the neighbors she is missing?”
Sometimes logic deserts us in a crisis. I scribbled notes and stuffed them in the collection of mailboxes at the end of the state-maintained road: Big black and white cat lost, blind. If you see her please offer food and call this number.
That evening, as I drove past the house at Ford 3, the reclusive owner was leaning on the porch and waved me down. He pointed. “Your cat’s over there. We gave her supper last night and today. She likes head rubs.”
O’Carolan sat content in her new pipe home. Nice people, regular meals, outdoor living….
We had to tilt the pipe up and chute-shoot her into a cat carrier. She snarled until she was in it, then began purring. Home we went, where I set out a can of her favorite food and she walked around as though two days of terror on my part had nothing to do with her.
In the words of my wise friend Amelia, “You had a harder time of it than she did.”
All’s well as ends well, but I did apologize to God for some of the mean things I said.
(O’Carolan reminiscing on her adventures from the safety of her porch)
Yes, this was my debut performance, but I prefer to call it my break-out. Anyone can see I’m a natural. And that I have a great instinct for choosing good scripts. At 12 weeks, I’m old enough to know what sells.
{ahem} So when the casting call went out for GIVING TUESDAY, I knew this was the role I had been born to play. My character drew her strength from true life experiences. It was a bit traumatic, really, reaching down in there and remembering the hard times with no food, no warm bed, no security, but it was worth it to see the producer’s jaw drop at the audition. And the rest is history. Making history, one might say. Teehee.
Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids 