Thursday, December 1, 2016

AirBnB for cats

A few days ago, I was weeding in our back yard when I sensed a motion beside me. I turned and saw a large black cat coming toward me. It brushed against me, got petted and then jumped up on my legs. I was kneeling with one knee on the ground, so neither the cat nor I was very stable but he persevered. A real attention junkie. I didn't get much weeding done. The next morning we discovered that the cat was sleeping across two chairs on our covered patio. (Large cat!) It stayed there sleeping well into the afternoon. More petting was needed after it got up. It spent the next night sleeping in the same chairs. When I opened the garage door, it conducted an extended inspection of our garage. We began to get worried that it didn't have a home and wasn't getting fed. After a couple of days of posts on the NextDoor website, I got a lead on a possible owner. Their cat had been gone for several weeks. I called the phone number given and the cat's "mom" arrived. The cat was indeed her Dickens.

Dickens wasn't that interested in jumping into her car. Under the car was fine, in front of the car was interesting and the read of the car needed checking out. Dickens then went for another trip around our back yard. I disappeared into our house so that Dickens mom could be the focus of his attention. After 5-10 minutes, she coaxed Dickens into the car.

We enjoyed having Dickens around even if we didn't get much weeding done. However, we were worried about him and were glad to have him returned to his family.