As I write this, the peace of evening has descended upon the house, and there’s a ball of cream-colored fluff the size of a cantaloupe curled up on Mr. Roy’s lap.
I take in the scene and marvel, because I don’t know how we got here, but we did.
…Sigh.
Okay FINE.
I do know how we got here, because it’s my fault.
It was a Tuesday morning two weeks ago, and there were precisely 17 minutes until it was time to leave to teach cycling. The house was quiet that morning, too. Tiny was getting ready upstairs, and beyond the hum of the air conditioner (the predicted high for the day was in the 90s, but already it felt like a steamer) little could be heard.
Except for some sort of meowing outside.
This is not, in itself, unusual. Our neighborhood has its share of itinerant feline adventurers who swoop in for a season and move along the next, searching for whatever grass is greener.
So at first, making some last-minute edits to my cycling plan, I ignored the meows, which sounded like they were coming from a tiny set of lungs. But they didn’t stop; in fact, they seemed to grow increasingly persistent.
Finally I decided it was time to investigate, so I set my laptop aside and ventured out the front door.
It didn’t take long to spot the problem. It was a tiny, vaguely Siamese-looking kitten standing at the junction between the driveway and the brick road, meowing with everything its little body could muster.
The sun was already hot, and I could tell the minute I saw it that its eyes were crusted shut.
I watched for a moment. The kitten didn’t appear to be behaving erratically; it just couldn’t see, had no parents or companions to be found and ran a very real danger of… just about everything that could happen to a blind kitten on a street on a 90-degree day in the middle of the suburbs.
So I did what I could do, which was to cautiously scoop it up, bring it inside to our small bathroom, provide it with food, water, a blanket and makeshift litter box and then go to teach my cycling class. (Whose members were and are deeply invested in this story.)
Tiny, of course, was over the moon. We called a vet and made an appointment. I said to the lady who answered the phone, “It’s not really our cat. I don’t even need to keep the cat. I just don’t want it to die.”
“What’s the cat’s name?” the lady asked me, and I panicked because I wasn’t prepared for this kind of pressure.
“Um, it looks kind of gray so we’ll go with Smokey,” I said.
When Smokey came in later that day for an examination, it (they couldn’t tell if it was a he or she, but estimated it to be about 4 weeks old) weighed in at 1.1 pounds. Even as I picked it up to put it in a carrier, I could feel its tiny heart beating behind its tiny ribs in my hand.
We were given medicine to take care of the eyes, instructed what to do for two weeks, then turned loose.
When I first sent Mr. Roy a message to inform him of the situation, I could tell it wasn’t his favorite news. “We can’t take care of every cat,” he rightly pointed out.
“I know,” I said. “But I really didn’t want it to die.”
Twenty-four hours later, Mr. Roy was watching a show from the couch with a 1-pound ball of fluff nestled into the crook of his arm.
“I’m not saying we’ll keep it,” he texted me later. “But I think Gepetto would be a good name if it were a boy.”
In the last two weeks, our furball has acquired more than adequate nourishment, a few toys of its own, a litter box that’s not makeshift and plenty of love and attention.
It has gone from listless and hopeless to bright-eyed (blue!) and playful.
It has gone from a lost cause to a story that we get to tell, and even though we’re not sure where this path leads, we’re thankful to be able to play a part in its story.
As I write this, the ball of fluff is still curled up in Mr. Roy’s lap.
I’m not sure how we got here, but I have some guesses about how it will end.
Abbey Roy is a mom of three girls who make every day an adventure. She writes to maintain her sanity. You can probably reach her at amroy@nncogannett.com, but responses are structured around bedtimes and weekends.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: A stray kitten found its way into the family | Abbey’s Road
Reporting by Abbey Roy, Newark Advocate / Newark Advocate
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By Abbey Roy, Newark Advocate | USA TODAY Network
