Sad Eyes

After a week of vacation followed by three days filled with obligations, I had promised myself that today would be set aside to work on my long-neglected book.
Without the long, dark afternoons of winter, I haven’t been getting anything accomplished.

          However, instead of heading directly to my computer as I wanted, I still had one more errand. I’d had a physical the day before and now needed annual bloodwork done, fasting of course, so this meant first thing in the morning. I’m not one of those people so casual about eating that I skip a meal, and off-handedly declare at two in the afternoon that maybe I’d have a corner of toast.

          Also, because I’d just returned from a week of fried fish and afternoons of ice cream cones, I needed to resume my two-mile morning walk.

          Okay, forty-five minutes later, sneakers off and Bandaid over the inside of my elbow, I made a pot of tea and settled at my computer only to hear a plaintive mew outside the back door. I knew I had just seen Satchel shedding away up on my bed, but maybe my husband had let him out. I looked through the screen and saw looking up at me the sad eyes of a scruffy, wet, grey cat, his tail so wet and thin it looked like it belonged on a rat. His collar told me that he wasn’t just a feral cat wandering by.

          First thought: Shut the door so I wouldn’t encourage it. Even at seventeen, Satchel is territorial and I didn’t need a showdown between a doddering elder and an animal weak from hunger.

          Second, and less selfish thought: What if this were my cat?

          I thought longingly of my new pot of tea and my empty stomach, but I went downstairs to get the cat carrier and then found my shoes. If this cat was sitting on my doorstep, I’d be able to just scoop him up into the carrier and off I’d take him to the animal shelter. Easy-peasy. 

          By the time I got outside, the cat hat retreated to the neighbor’s yard across the street and my husband was learning that it had been around for the past week but no one had been able to catch it.

          Several phone calls later and here I am with a Have-A-Heart trap and the animal control officer in my driveway explaining what to do when I catch a fox, opossum, raccoon, or skunk (!) as he assured me I inevitably would.

          No good deed goes unpunished.

I fear that my original plan of palming all this off on one of the neighbors may not work.