Lost Kitty Tale
Once there was a kitty who chose us as her family. My husband had seen her around the neighborhood, and one day she came trotting through the flowerbed up to our door and asked to be let in.
Dan instantly wanted to keep her. She was a young-ish calico, and he knew how much I love calicos. But I wasn’t sure. Our most recent calico, Julia, who was the most beautiful cat in the world (or so she told us) had died just a little while before, and I didn’t think I was ready to give my heart to another one.
Then fate stepped in. We saw a flyer in our neighborhood for a missing calico cat. The address was very close to us. So we called the people who put up the flyer and invited them over to check out the stray.
At this point, any normal person would have held out the cat and said, “Is this her?”
But I’m not (as you probably have noticed) a normal person. I left the cat in the bathroom, which is where we keep stray cats until they pass a vet check.
I approached the guy, the putative owner. “So you’ve lost your cat.”
“Yes,” he said.
“A calico.”
“Yes.”
“Is she thin or chonky?”
“Medium, I guess.”
“What color are her eyes?”
“Yellow.”
I continued the interrogation.
“What color is her nose?”
“Pink.”
“What’s her chin look like?”
“I don’t know. Nothing special, I guess.”
“What color are her feet?”
“White….” (He was beginning to catch on to the not-normal thing.)
He was batting less than 50 percent. Her nose was pink and her feet were white, which could have been true of any cat. But there were telltales. The stray was slender, not medium. There was a slight gray smudge on her chin. She had one green eye and one yellow, which was a dead giveaway.
At that point, I brought the cat out.
“No,” the neighbor said, disappointed. “That’s not her.” And he sadly left.
That was the moment that I knew that not only had she chosen us, but I had chosen her too.
We named her Dushenka (Russian for “Little Soul”) and she stayed with us for 12 years. She still escaped and went walkabout on occasion, just to keep her hand — er, her paw — in, but she always came back to us. We were hers.
