What's Past Is Past...

An entire year ago,  you may remember, I was desperately seeking Silver, my little five-year-old cat who ran away. The cat carrier fell apart on our arrival back home after visiting the vet to get her inoculations and she bolted, took off for the wooded area behind our house and was gone for exactly seven weeks. At the time, it seemed like seven years being lost in the desert.

The entire time she was missing, I alternated between hope and hopelessness, but I also had to learn to accept the possibility of life without her while vowing to never give up on finding her. I must have looked out the windows a thousand times, like a ghost.
Valuable life lessons were learned, and as I wrote my little messages to put in my "hope chest" (what others might call a prayer or "God" box) that read something like, "Hoping she returns safe and sound" and "Whatever happens is for the greatest good" I was also confident she knew how to take care of herself in the wild. Still, I was constantly consumed by anxiety, grief and fear.

I worried about coyotes and cars and owls and cruel people, but mostly I just missed her rolling on the floor at my feet or jumping up on my lap or seeing her little innocent face looking up at me. And then one evening, quite by happy accident, exactly seven weeks later, she ran past me and stopped when I called out to her. I brought her food and picked her up (she weighed no more than a kitten) and carried her back inside, where she seems quite content to remain.

Her brother, Copper, was such a comfort to me while she was gone, and I think he, too, was relieved when she came home. After all, they are twins (both six years old now), so he must have felt strange being all alone. I think he must have sensed my sorrow and we often took comfort in each other.

During our ordeal, I was supported by my husband, my family and some rock-solid friends. I also read two very helpful books. One was The Secrets of Lost Cats: One Woman, Twenty Posters and a New Understanding of Love by Dr. Nancy Davidson, given to me by my husband. The other, loaned to me by our wonderful village postmaster, was Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation and GPS Technology by Caroline Paul. Informative and amusing, I highly recommend them both.

Relatively speaking, things are pretty good in my neck of the woods these days. In a world so wracked by uncertainty and doubt, we are all just happy to be together again, bound by love and gratitude and the deep blue sea.