No stranger danger, just a long-lost cat

One of the few times she posed for a picture.

In spite of everything that's happened in the last week -- or month, or year, or however you define when bad things fall -- there are still ways people can make you believe in the simple goodness that we all have in our hearts.


A background: My fiancée, Leah, and I live in Delaware OH. We rent a little apartment about two blocks from Ohio Wesleyan, where I went to school. Two days after we moved in in August of 2010, a friend at school called me and asked if we wanted a cat. We reluctantly took the little guy in, thinking we would foster him. Well, that turned into not wanting to let him go, and we kept Scoops to this day.


We began noticing that he wasn't the only stray we had around. A cat and her kittens hung around the area, so we named them and fed them and gave them some love. Burger, a fluffy grey cat, and her daughter, Cali the calico, were present most often and got the most of our attention. We let Cali inside to visit and to warm up in the winter, because her excitability and raspy meow were too damn cute to leave in the cold. She was lovable, yes, but sometimes she was too busy headbutting your chin and hands or biting you to be too much of a lap cat. She was a bit dim, and not a good bug chaser. But she was funny, and always there when I wanted to pet a cat.


In the spring, both Burger and Cali had kittens -- Burger in March and Cali in April. Our house was home to Scoops, and two mother cats with three kittens each. We became quite popular. One of Burger's is in Minneapolis, and the other two went to separate homes in the Columbus area.

Cali and babies, April 2011

Cali's kittens stayed closer. Nugget, an orange male, stayed with us. Kipper, a female grey tabby, went to one of my littles in my sorority. Pooter, a calico who looks and acts very similar to her mother, went to a friend from work. Several months later, Cali joined her -- we had added another stray to the house and just didn't know if we could keep four kitties. We never planned on keeping Cali, she just stayed inside after she had kittens. So, she joined her daughter in Fredericktown, almost an hour away, with Pooter. Our friend from work had two other cats, two young kids and a fiancé

From top: Kipper, Pooter, Nugget.

When we went to visit this April, we learned Cali was hiding in our friend's garage. I went in there and called around, and immediately heard her raspy chirp. She carefully got down from the rafters and ran to me, standing on her hind feet so she could reach my outstretched hands. She didn't really like the kids, it turns out, and would sometimes try to escape. We brought her back in and I cuddled with her. I definitely had missed her, but she stayed there. I figured she would get used to it.


Well. Things went bad with our friend and her fiancé in May. He moved out, she and the kids went somewhere else. We took Pooter in, but our friend couldn't find Cali. She was outside again, nowhere to be found. Maybe she was happier there, I thought. From the sounds of it, Cali enjoyed being out -- she was an outdoor cat when we found her, after all. She loved escaping from our friend's house. Maybe she just wanted to be an outdoor kitty.

Then, my little went to Colorado for an internship and I agreed to babysit. The siblings were reunited. Kipper and Pooter reminded me so much of Cali with their mannerisms. Nugget got her klutziness. Kipper got her neurotic, skittish nature and her rattly purr. Pooter got her small body and her love for standing on hind legs to rub against you. All got her funny triangle face, long tail and high meow.

Nugget with his toy mousie a few months or so ago.

Pooter and Kipper take a July snooze.

Cali was all of a sudden in my mind. Was she okay? Had someone fed her? Was she trying to find her way back to Delaware, almost 40 miles away?

Yesterday, her little calico self was just running around my brain. We had to go get her.

Fast-forward to today (July 23): Leah told me not to be too optimistic, that maybe Cali wasn't there. Maybe someone took her in, and she was happy in her new life. I didn't care where she was, as long as I knew she was safe and happy. But I secretly hoped she would be just somewhere waiting, and I would hop out of the car and she would be right there so I could take her home.

So we made the drive to our friend's old neighborhood, up I-71 and down a country road or two. We parked up the street from her old apartment and walked to the door. I had printed out flyers with a blurry picture of Cali to hand out/hang up. The lady at our friend's old house had just moved in with her family a week ago and hadn't seen Cali. She wished me luck and I handed her a flyer. I checked under the porch, but no calico. So, we went around the building to the two side doors. A grey kitten came when we called, so that was a start. These were cat people, it seemed.

A blonde young woman named Jen and her daughter answered the first door. The kitten wasn't theirs, Jen said, but she had seen a calico hanging around next door. The picture on the flyer wasn't too clear, so Leah showed Jen a picture from her phone. She seemed genuinely interested and was puzzling over if she had really seen our friend Cali next door.

"She's orange and black," I said.

"Orange and white," Leah insisted.


Jen ducked back inside. I walked next door to call for Cali and knocked. No answer. 

Jen came back out and asked us who the cat really belonged to. So we talked for a bit about Cali -- how she found her way here, her mannerisms, her cute little white feet. Jen was determined to ask her neighbor if she had seen Cali, so she stood and called in to the apartment while I looked around the yard. No Cali.

We thanked Jen and walked on, stopping to ask a man if he had seen Cali -- and he had! Just an hour ago, sitting on his truck trailer. She was skittish, but he threw her some bologna and she took off. We handed him and his wife a flyer -- I never got their names -- and turned down a side street, still calling for the cat.

As I crouched by an abandoned house and called Cali, my phone rang. It was Jen. She said she saw a calico cat trying to get in her neighbor's house. I half-ran the other direction.


'Is she mostly grey?" Jen was asking.


Cali had some tabby striping down her side. "Uh, like half. Is there orange on the cat?"


"Yeah, like a peach. ...let me see if I can get her." Cali was a darker orange and not quite "peach," but there was hope. Jen called the cat as I cut through someone's lawn and raced to their building, Leah on my heels. A woman and a man stood on the side porch where I had been knocking earlier. 


"Are you the ones looking for a cat?" they asked. We nodded. Jen's head poked around the corner, and a little calico cat pranced over to the young couple. It was a small calico, but it wasn't our Cali. It was light grey and peach, not the sharper black, orange and white we were looking for.


The woman -- I think her name was Heidi -- said she had just seen Cali a few days ago under a nearby tree. She said she got Cali confused with her lighter calico sometimes. She even let us poke around in her garage. No Cali. I gave her a flyer and Leah told her how to possibly catch her so we could pick her up.


So at least Cali was around. But now I was determined to find that cat.


Jen and Heidi wished us luck again. They stood on the porch talking as we walked away. A middle-aged man was sitting on a swing at the building next door, drinking a soda.


"What color is your cat?"


"She's a calico," said Leah, and explained the whole orange-black-white thing. Mike, as I found out his name was, had seen Cali a few weeks ago lying in the road with her paws up. He said he thought she had been hit, but she was just playing.


Sounded like Cali to me.


Mike asked if we had asked the couple across the street anything. 


"They're really nice people," he said.


He put on his ball cap and walked over with us. Jenny, an elderly woman, opened the door. She hadn't seen Cali too much, but said she sometimes saw her laying in the sun just over the fence.


Mike's brother lived over the fence, so Mike led us back through his yard. We both called for Cali. I had my eyes focused on a bush ahead when Leah stopped.


"I hear something."


We called again.


There was no mistaking that meow.


In between the fence appeared a triangular little face. Cali was at once terrified and ecstatic, and darted behind the fence a few times just to come back out and nudge Leah. I tried to pick the little cat up, but she freaked out and clawed at me to get down.


We needed to get her in the car. So I ran to Leah's car, adjusted the seats for my tall frame and rolled down the street. Cali came running to me when I walked across the grass, and we got her in with no problem.


We thanked Mike profusely for showing us around. He smiled.


"Come back and see us sometime!" he said.


We pulled in to Jen's driveway to share the good news. She peeked at Cali in the back seat and smiled. Heidi waved at us from her window.


I drove out of the neighborhood, watching occasionally as Cali settled in to Leah's lap and purred away. We both had tears in our eyes to see her so happy and safe. But I was also focused on the kindness of complete strangers, people who let us walk through their yards and talk to them about the cat, people who offered tips and helped us look. And, of course, the people who fed Cali while she roamed freely outside for three months.


Now, she's back in the neighborhood she was born in. She'll probably be indoor/outdoor, as she always has been. She is currently locked in our guest room, because she hissed at her children the whole time she was in the living room with us.


But she purred the whole way home.

WELCOME HOME, CALI!!!!