A pawful of wonderful folks and I work with the city shelter to find homes for impounded cats. Our service is called Cat Adoption Trust Sudbury (CATS). The space we work out of, primarily, is Small Things: Kitty Boutique.
Mary works primarily with the mommy cats and kittens, and she has a handful of fabulous foster homes for this. Me, I work primarily with the older phat cats. These are the laid back ladies and gents who’d be drinking beer and eating potato chips if they had ID cards and opposable thumbs. More my speed.
There are a variety of good reasons to not let me look after small things.
You see, I have a habit of losing them – be it keys, glasses, wallets or kittens. But yesterday we were short a foster home, so Mary and I, with some mutual concern, agreed that I would take Hannah and her five little kittens home under a couple of provisos including that the room be reasonably free of other cats and dangerous goods.
“OK,” I assured myself, “I can do this.”
We have a basement room that is currently empty – we had to have the outside wall fixed and the clutter from it is still sitting in my living room. No dangling wires, no chocolate. I set up mommy and kits with the essentials, including a comfy cat basket. So far so good.
After fixing up my phat cats in my regular “cat room,” I went to check in on my other charges. Hannah was sitting in the middle of the room with a “no kitties here” look on her face.
Crumbs! There was nothing in the room except cat stuff. Where could they be, already? And then I heard “meow, meow” coming from the wall. Mommy had hidden her babies in a hole in the wall intended to house a pipe, not a brood.
I reached in, grabbed all five kitties – counted them twice and stuck a brick in the wall. Ha ha! I went upstairs to make supper and heard a clunk!
Noooooooo! Downstairs again. This time all the kittens were out and about, but mommy was hiding in the wall. And she was not about to leave.
Hmmm. I put the five kittens in the basket and put them on the other side of the room, and pressed myself up against the wall with the hole in it. I felt like I was in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Sure enough, the babies started to cry and out came mommy to investigate. Busted! This time I plugged the hole with two bricks (and I’m hoping that foster home comes through soon).
Meanwhile, my phat cats are all doing well. First-Massey (from First St. in Massey) is the Romeo of the crew – strutting what is left of “his stuff.” Moonlight (from the street of the same name) is determined to find his original family and regularly tries to escape. Kathleen (from you-guessed-it) is having no part of any of this and is safeguarding her basket.
Williamette (a female kitten from William Street) is another story. She is small enough to squeeze through the sizable space under the cat room door and is running around the house, surprise-attacking my flabby felines.
But when she gets tired, she stuffs herself back under the door and curls up with “First-Massey.”
There's no place like Rome's
Jan Carrie Steven is a volunteer with Cat Adoption Trust Sudbury (CATS).
