Moving becomes more and more traumatic each time, since having Ms Perpetual Motion in our lives. There is so much more stuff: blocks and books and old ratty cloth diapers and adorable onzies I can't part with even though they have not fit for two years. The poor dog and cat get awfully neglected during these weekends of utter chaos. During the second to the last move, in August of 2006, the dog practically went into respiratory distress between the humid, miserable August heat and the inevitable dust whirling through the air during the packing process. He fared better this last move but the cat suffered instead. We had decided that we would just get her loaded at the very end, after everything else had been dealt with. It was a pretty complicated move because some stuff would go with us for five months or so and some stuff would go to a few different storage facilities. The owners of the house to be moved out of were there fixing, painting, cleaning, mowing and such in preparation for re-entry onto the housing market. I was in the middle of one of my tougher medicine rotations. And in and out and all around amongst all of this was a wild-child zipping here and there, feeding voraciously off of the madness of her sticky, filthy parents. This time it was the cat who got left in the dust. She was not actually abandoned. We looked for her at the end and we suddenly realized she was nowhere to be found. I sent everyone away and tried calling her all through the house and all around the house and yard. This technique had worked in the past. She has a history of only coming to me and only when there is an ire of calm. But I heard nothing. No mews or meows or chirps which she sometimes makes when sprinting across the yard or living room. It seemed as though she had become fed up with us and our hectic life and just took off to live out her days in an undesirable town.
I went back to the house three or four afternoons in a row after work the following week and tried calling her. We had left tuna out. I went down into the basement and tried to listen for any little kitty footsteps in the extensive duct work. Nothing. I worried she had wedged herself into the drier vent, got stuck, suffocated and expired. There were no real signs of this except for my paranoia. (She had done this before when my parents moved out of one of their houses, but that drier vent had a larger diameter and less tortuous course.) Into the second week of the disappearance I had given up hope. She was a fifteen year old cat, seemingly in fair health but maybe she had just gotten tired and decided to take that last venture into the shrubs I thought.
At the beginning of the third week missing I got a call from my husband saying he had gone to the house in the morning (doing a little post-move-out turd-polishing for the owners) and he saw Crescent streak across the yard. He attempted to call for her but knew it was pretty much futile. I managed to release myself from the chains of the hospital world a little early that day and made a stop at the market for some tuna in bag on the way. I had about 30 minutes before it would be time to pick up Ms Perpetual Motion from the baby sitter's. It would be so much harder to catch the cat with her at my side. I knew I had to work efficiently.
To Be Continued...
