Strays

My oldest daughter likes bringing home strays. Sometimes it’s stray people. We’ve had a few of her friends wind up sleeping on our couch for a few days at a time while they were looking for more permanent digs. One young woman, for instance, had been kicked out of her adoptive grandmother’s house with nothing but the clothes on her back; she didn’t even have any identification—like a social security number—making it tough to get a job. My daughter helped her get new ID and ultimately helped reconcile her with her grandmother.

More commonly, my oldest brings home stray animals. Sometimes she gets the other daughters—and even my wife—to conspire in this process. For instance, a cat has been living with us for the past six years thanks to just such a conspiracy. My daughter and her sisters got her from a neighbor as a kitten. They made me look into its eyes. It wasn’t long before the kitten was purring on my lap. And they already knew I was inordinately fond of cats, a common failing among writers. So the cat stayed.

Her name is Halo. She is not named after the Microsoft X-box game; instead she is obliquely named after our previous cat, Angel. We had acquired Angel long before we acquired my children. A more neurotic cat you’d rarely find: terrified of people in general, she spent a good part of her day hiding under the bed. Angel had come from a friend who had married a sergeant in the Air Force who then got orders to go to England. She decided that she didn’t want to take Angel with them. The months of quarantine the poor animal would have had to endure seemed more than her fragile psyche could handle.

So my wife and I agreed to take the cat. Soon, thereafter, shortly after we had acquired the children, we also had a dog: a black Labrador mix that my wife brought home when one of her colleagues at work moved and didn’t want to take the dog—called Bear—with him. My wife’s colleague had been a smoker and Bear died of lung cancer about four years later.

Not long after that, we took in the high school-aged daughter of a couple from our church who were going through some significant problems. She stayed with us until she graduated from high school.

Our current dog is a poodle that my wife got from a dog pound when he was about a year or two old. He’s doing quite well and is completely devoted and attached to my wife.

Okay, so maybe my oldest daughter learned to take in strays because that’s what my wife and I do.

And, in the last month, my oldest daughter happened to notice a stray black cat in the neighborhood of one of her friends. Unusually friendly, the cat also happened to be pregnant. My daughter became concerned about her as the weeks went by and so one day she brought her home and set up a space for her in our garage. My daughter’s hope was that she would stay in her little bed that she had made for her and that she’d have her kittens there. My children, and even my wife, do not know cats all that well, even though we’ve had cats now for decades now. I knew what was going to happen, and of course it did.

When the time came for the mama cat to give birth, she found a place in the garage to hide and had them there. I knew she had given birth when she vanished for long periods of time from her normal bed, only coming out periodically to get food and water. My children and my wife were afraid that the kittens had died because they couldn’t see or hear them.

Of course, one day as we were cleaning the garage, my wife found where the mommy cat had given birth and where she was hiding her kittens. There were four of them. Three black, one dark gray (the mommy cat is a black cat).

So, my wife and oldest daughter moved the mommy cat and kittens to the bed that my daughter had prepared for her. She stayed there with the kittens about twenty-four hours and then promptly hid them again. This happened a couple of times, until the kittens got a bit older.

Now, my oldest daughter has created a larger space in the garage for the mommy cat and her kittens to wander about in; and since it has started getting hot, now she brings them into the house and puts them in one of our bathrooms during the day, returning them to the garage in the evening.

My daughters and my wife have already found likely homes for the four kittens once they get older, and for the mommy, too. I would not be entirely startled, however, if we somehow end up with at least one extra cat. Some strays never go away.