elfs | Cat Blogging: The Missing Cat

When Dinah first moved in with us, it wasn't all wonderful. She didn't know what to make of her new surroundings and her new owners. She seemed fine for the first couple of weeks.

Our apartment at the time was on a very busy arterial, four lanes plus a turn lane, leading off the freeway and past the steel plant up into the heart of the Delridge district. Across the street from us was a multipurpose office building most notable for the big sign outside that read "Kidney Center." Dinah decided one day to try and cross that street.

Omaha and I didn't know this, mind you. We just knew that Dinah had gone missing. We were upset; we'd lost another cat that way, he just disappeared one night-- although Omaha has suspicions that a neighbor killed Hershey because we'd called in a noise complaint on a drunken, rowdy party several nights before that. But we had no such neighbor problems at the old Delridge apartment. Dinah was just gone.

A few days later I was walking home from the bus stop, up the other side of the road. I heard a familiar meow come from the bushes of the Kidney Center, and I looked over and there was Dinah, looking very cold and lost. "Dinah?" She meowed and took a step toward me, tentatively. I think she still was unclear on the concept of me as her caretaker.

I grabbed her and wrapped her in the windbreaker I was wearing and ran across the street shouting, "Omaha! Open the door! Open the door!" I must have sounded hysterical but then I'd just rescued our lost cat, so maybe I was a bit.

We were so grateful to have her home, and she was grateful to be home. And the street was another thing she never tried again. I think she was happier with the vast field of brambles behind the apartment anyway.