Friday, April 08, 2011

Missing

When I got home from school yesterday I noticed Junior wasn't around and wasn't in the house.  Not a big deal - he was probably staying cool in the next door neighbor's shrubs, but normally he would come out when I pull in the drive.  But later as we left to go to dinner and a ballgame with friends, he still wasn't around.  Kind of odd, since it was close to his dinner time.

Still, he is a cat and cats do things according to their plans.  We go to dinner and the game, and I start texting Addison to see if he's shown up.  I know something's wrong when hours later he still isn't home.  Junior doesn't prowl far from home.  He usually won't go further than halfway down the driveway and certainly no further than one house over.  And we'd figured out that no one had seen him since the morning.

We ended up going home a little early from the game, because I was really starting to worry about this mean brat of a cat that I love.

Addison and Jeffrey and Alan and I get flashlights and start searching.  He's nowhere.  We knock on neighbors' doors asking if they've seen him.  I'm getting close to tears when I decide to check unusual places in the house while the others search outside.  The cabinets.  I hadn't checked the cabinets.  I start in the kitchen and then check the hallway bathroom.  And there in the linen closet is one hungry but happy cat.  Addison remembers closing the cabinet door early that morning and no one had opened it since.


I showered him with hugs and kisses that he, of course, smugly turned away from.  But that told me that everything was back as it should be.

1 comment:

jo said...

OH man. We've had this happen to us on a number of occasions. I will search and search and search and not find Patches. I'll get all worked up but try and stay calm (Doug gets worked up - not me) and we will both be praying and almost in tears and then inevitably she will stretch and yawn and crawl out of some little hole where she had been sleeping and ignoring our desperate yells of her name.
punk.
got to love them cats!