While downtown, Alice saw a child with an orange kitten riding on her shoulder.
Alice approached the little girl who said, “I am giving our cat’s kittens away and this is the only one left.” Alice had two dogs and four cats, so she was not in the market for a new pet, and her
attorney husband, Henry, would flip if she brought another home. But, a minute later Alice walked away with the free-fluffy feline wondering what to tell her husband.
“When I arrived home,” said Alice, “I showed Henry the kitten and told him that I had to make dinner. Then I calculatingly placed the kitten on his lap, and quickly turned towards the kitchen to not let him ‘read’ my face and prevent any cross examination. Only then, did I casually mention, ‘In the
morning, I am taking her to the animal shelter.’”
Ten minutes later, Henry called out, “Honey! There is no need to find the kitten another home. She has one here.” Alice smiled at her premeditated adoption. Even though Henry was a brilliant lawyer, she was an amazingly clever kitty con artist.
The kitten was named Lady Edwina after England’s Lord Mountbatten’s wife.
Henry and Alice’s cats have an enclosed outdoor
area that prevents them from falling prey to coyotes.
Five years later, in November, Edwina some how escaped. The frantic couple posted LOST flyers and notices in the newspaper for weeks and wandered the streets calling her.
November turned into December. Alice was not to be deterred, she put up $500 reward posters. As the weather grew colder, Henry gently told Alice, “You have to realize that Edwina is gone. It’s been six weeks, she
won’t be back. We have to let her go.”
After Christmas, a determined Alice put up another round of posters. In late January, their neighbor’s ten-year-old son said, “I saw your orange cat in our yard.”
“We’d had several phone calls,” said Alice, “from people who thought they had seen our cat. Unfortunately, when we went to look, it wasn’t her. As I followed the boy he changed his story to, ‘I saw her in our
basement.’”
So, they descended the backyard steps into a murky basement, littered with plywood and wallboard, being remodeled by the “worst handyman in town.”
“I peered around the dark enclosure,” said Alice, “and saw new wallboard behind their furnace, sealing off the crawlspace.”
When Alice walked over to it, she was paws-itive that she heard a faint meow.
She called, “Edwina” and the cat
answered in a louder meow. The boy ran for his father to free the walled up cat. After the handyman ripped off the dry wall, Alice squinted into the dark hole and saw cat’s eyes in the crawl space. She held her breath and flashed a light towards them - and THERE was Edwina!
Edwina may have been out of confinement, but as they say, “She was not out of the woods.”. Her health was purr-carious. She had been holed up in the dark for three months, so her eyes were
glassed over, and she was dehydrated and starved.
“I ran her home,” said Alice, “and when Henry saw her, in utter disbelief, he gently took her from me and . . . for the first time in our married life . . . I saw him cry. He turned away as his tears fell. My hard core attorney husband then drove me to the vet with “his” kitty.
Our vet could not believe that Edwina had survived such a long ordeal. ‘There is no reason that she is alive,’ he
said. ‘She was hours away from unconsciousness, and being so dehydrated it is a miracle that she could meow. She must have survived by licking condensation from the furnace and eating bugs.’
What happened after we arrived home from the vets was equally as shocking! My tough husband had turned into an excited little boy because his beloved cat was back. In his elation, he phoned his golfing buddies, grown children, business partners, government official friends
(even one in Australia) exclaiming, ‘My cat is home!’”
She was dazed for days, but she knew that she was home. It took Edwina several months to recover, but when she was held, petted, or talked to, she responded by purring and happily kneading her paws. Once released from her three month prison, Lady Edwina went on to live in the lap of luxury, until her 20th birthday and she never wandered out of the yard again.
Editors
Note:
Four years later, after Henry’s illness and until his passing, “his” cat, Lady Edwina, never left his bedside. The two of them were curled up together in the bed covers wrapped in love.
