Jolie the Cat

About two days into living in our new house we lost one of our cats, Jolie. I don’t mean that she died, but that we actually lost her. We let her outside for a little fresh air, and she just didn’t come back. We kept figuring that she’d return eventually, but a full week went by and still nothing. Nick and I started checking local animal shelters to see if someone had turned her in, but didn’t have any luck. We stopped by our old house to see if perhaps she had decided that her new home sucked since it didn’t have a dark, dank crawl space for her to sleep in and tried to make her way back. Kind of like in Homeward Bound: The incredible Journey…except that it would have only been 9 blocks away and taken her less than half an hour to get there. I even passed around fliers to the neighborhood in the hopes that someone would have seen her recently. By the time 10 days had gone by, Nick had written her off as dead.

Because we already lost one cat, we were reluctant to put in a dog/cat door. We were afraid that our other cat would high-tail it out of here as well. But since Girls Camp was coming up and we needed a way for our pets to poop and pee outside of our house while we were out of town for the week, Nick reluctantly installed a dog door on Sunday evening. It happened to be the same brand that we had in our old house.

At about 12:30 that night, Nick was awoken to the sound of a small meowing sound next to the bed…, and it didn’t sound like the gruff meow of their remaining cat. He switched on the light and saw Jolie slinking around the room, looking for attention.

He just figured that she must have seen that familiar, glowing square of a dog door and made her way towards it. After 10 days, she just waltzed inside like nothing had happened. I started wondering what she could have done in those 10 days. 10 days is a long time. Where could she have been?

It wasn’t until the next day that Nick noticed that she looked slightly different than before. Don’t worry, it was still Jolie, but something was just off. After closer inspection it looked like her tummy fur was a little shorter, like it had been trimmed. Her ears looked cleaner. She smelled good. She just looked…better. Like she had been professionally groomed.

We believe that someone in our neighborhood had found her, taken her in, paid to get her all cleaned up, saw one of our fliers, and then decided to let her go. Then, that evening, Jolie just happened to see our new dog door and decided to walk through it.

It’s weird how stuff like that just happens.

PS. If the person who cleaned my cat is reading this, please contact me and I’ll let you borrow my other cat for a week or so. And maybe my dog too.