Cat Makes Monkey Of Mom

Yesterday afternoon at 3 p.m. when the front door was open long enough for Miss Kitty to make her escape, I was not overly concerned. I knew she'd not like it out there in the cold for very long. So, an hour later, when I looked out the front door and then the back door and called to her and jingled her ball, and she didn't come, I was just a little surprised. I repeated my invitation for her to come back in several times. No response. Finally, just before 6 p.m., I decided to see if she had somehow gotten over the 7-foot-tall back wall into the escape-proof backyard of our neighbor.







She had done that before. In the summer of 2008. That time, it had been a Sunday morning and I had had to drive around to that neighbor's front door, ring the doorbell, and ask a surprised older woman in hair curlers permission to fetch my cat from her backyard.







This time, no one was home and the gate was locked. As I tromped across the snow to the gate and back, I thought about the foot prints I was leaving in the snow: The "evidence" of a potential intruder!!







And I wondered what the people in the neighboring houses thought I might be doing. And if they might phone the police about my suspicious behavior.




Back at home, I enlisted the aid of The Knight to fetch some ladders so that I could climb over the wall and rescue Miss Kitty. The Knight was grumpy about it as he shook the leaves off the ladders lying against the house, and propped one ladder against the fence and tipped the other one over the top of the wall into the neighbor's yard.

Now, I am sure you are wondering why The Knight didn't do the chivalrous thing and climb over the fence himself instead of letting me do it. I did momentarily think about asking him to do it. But I rejected the idea immediately. Miss Kitty might run away from him. She might even run away from me. But, I knew I had a better chance of getting her than he did. So up the ladder I went to the top of the wall.

Did I mention that I am afraid of heights?

Did I mention that my right ankle has a severe case of painful tendonitis?

I got onto the top of the wall itself, then shakily maneuvered over to the other ladder and climbed down, trespassing into the yard. Miss Kitty was sitting daintily in a snowless spot next to the house. She waited patiently as I crunched across the snow and picked her up. (*I knew you'd come!* she said.) She meekly allowed me to tote her back to the wall and hand her up to The Knight who was on the ladder on the other side. She did not struggle at all.

Cat rescue complete!!

Nevertheless, I still had to climb up the ladder, mount the top of the wall again, transfer to the other ladder and climb back down. During all this, I was wondering how many neighbors were observing my acrobatics show. It had to have looked pretty funny: a chubby old grandma climbing over a wall....

Fortunately no one phoned the police.

At Church an hour later, another neighbor whose yard borders ours seemed to look at me with immense pity and with a rather smirky smile. She probably took a video of the whole thing and put it on You Tube.

The escape artist:

Miss Kitty.