Last night the cat went missing. This is unusual. Veneta is a sociable kitty and usually can be found within a few hundred feet of the family. She generally comes when we call her. We know her habits and her ways, but last night she was nowhere to be found. We searched the house, and Veneta was well and truly missing. She was not on a dining room chair tucked beneath the table. She was neither on my desk nor under it. We could find her in none of the closets. We took the search outside.
She was not in the barn. She hadn’t gotten locked in a car or the truck. She was not in the granary or the tobacco shed. We put Molly on a leash, grabbed a flashlight and hiked down the lane to the hoop house. Veneta was not there. On the way back we checked all the outbuildings again, and while we surprised a small squeaking critter in the tobacco shed, Veneta was not in there stalking it.
We checked the road. No pathetic corpse, no flat cat, no tell tale sign of a kitty dragging herself off into the weeds to die. Naturally then our thoughts turned to coyotes. And owls. When we passed the windbreak we had heard a peculiar wheezing and chittering that we chalked up to the noise of some unpleasant night bird. I took the flashlight and circled the windbreak until I could shine a light on a spot perhaps twenty feet up in the trees where the wheezing seemed to center. No Veneta up there, and the bird, whatever kind of bird it was, wheezed away, undeterred by the strong beam of light sweeping the tree.
The outdoors was dark and huge. Indoors was more contained and re-searchable. We went back inside. Perhaps, we thought, she had climbed into Kristen’s van and been taken for a ride. We thought we’d call Kristen but then we discovered an open closet door. And there, cozy in a pile of sweaters on the closet shelf, we found Veneta snoozing. She had of course been far too comfortable to come when we’d called. We were so glad to find her that there was then no thought of reproach or remonstrance regarding the incomplete nature of the earlier part of the search, the part before we went outdoors, the part where we had assured each other that we had checked all the closets.
That came later, with this post.
[tags]did you check all the closets[/tags]
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