The Cat Came Back

Some of you may know that the passed 48 hours have been rather harrowing. Tuesday morning, after a large amount of meowing on the part of my cat, I proceeded to let her out on the balcony so she could go sit in the sun and poof up her tail at the neighbor cats who run around behind the building. I didn’t really think anything of it because over the last couple of weeks she’s been going out on the balcony for a couple of hours and then coming back in, like animals do. So that morning I let her out around 8am so she could do her sniffing, and I proceeded to lay back down because recently I’ve been waking up later in the day.

At around noon when I got up (yeah, I’m bum, deal with it), I went to the balcony to let her back in but she was gone. Not to worry, I thought, as she likes to jump over to the balcony right next to mine and sniff around there too. Upon sticking my head around over the guardrail, I could not see anything milling around over there either. Through the great powers of my deduction skills, I surmised that the only place the cat could be was on the ground.

Normally with cats I wouldn’t really have any problem with them running off for a little while. That’s what cats do. In this situation, however, I couldn’t be so enthusiastic. My cat for the last two years has been solely an inside cat, and while she has been a stray before, where I live now makes it very difficult for her to get her bearings. I’m on the second floor of a four unit building. There’s a door and a staircase that separates the units with some mailboxes in a lobby area there, so even if she thought – in English – “Hey, that’s my building right there!” she wouldn’t really have any means of getting inside.

Shortly after my realization that she was gone and after a thorough searching of the condo to make sure she didn’t somehow follow me back inside from earlier in the day, I quickly made my way outside to do a search. The condo complex has about 15 buildings and the area is mostly paved, but there is quite a bit of grass and squirrels and things too, so my hope was that she just was wandering around looking at birds. Unfortunately, on this maiden voyage I didn’t see or hear her. And then the subsequent times throughout the day I checked the area I didn’t run across anything. I did, however, find a tuft of her hair on my neighbor’s fence right where she would have jumped down from the balcony, so that pretty clinched it, if for some reason the eerie silence in the condo didn’t do that already.

After a few failed searches, I gave up for the night. The following day was pretty much the same. Around the neighborhood searches proved fruitless, but I did post some fliers in some of the condo buildings. I attempted to contact the shelters in the area, but I couldn’t get in touch with anyone. They were “out of the office” for 5 hours. The OKC shelter, which is miles and miles from where I live currently, won’t give out any information on lost pets. In a big city, that’s understandable, but aggravating. So another day of searching didn’t do much. I resigned to put myself in a state of mind that she very well could not return, and I went to bed.

UNTIL

6am this morning. In my slumber, I got a call from an unknown number. One of the residents in the building had a cat on their porch that looked surprisingly similar to the photo on the flier. I jumped out of bed and put my pants on, rushing downstairs to see what’s up, and sure enough, there was Calliope. Joy! The question I have now is whether she was on the porch the whole time or if she just came back. That question has quickly faded, as I don’t really care, but it did come to mind.

So all in all, I can finally rest at ease. It’s a strange feeling to not have a tiny heater sleep with you on the bed taking up all the covers. I can hurry up and get back to being slowly pushed to the edge of the mattress.

By the way, Calliope was napping on my lap as I wrote this.