One night Cleo went on vacation. I didn’t know it and she didn’t tell me she was going. When she didn’t come home all night and next day I thought she was dead.
I called her to bed the way I always do at dark time. She always comes. My neighbors tell me they can hear me call Cleo every night from two farms away. I try not to be too loud but a loud call is what gets Cleo’s attention. Most of the time I might as well not bother because she comes in when she wants to.
She always spends the night in her bed, a cardboard tomato box atop my file box on my side dresser. I put an old sweater in the box to make it softer. She likes it.
This time I called her until I was hoarse. No cat. Finally, I left the light on, stayed up a while and watched TV, just in case she changed her mind or had been delayed by some cat business I would not understand.
By 10 p.m. I was too tired to stay up. I figured if Cleo found something more important than her bed box, that was her choice. I was finished worrying about her. I slept with the porch light on all night just in case she showed up and let me know she wanted to come home.
When morning came and still no cat, I went down to the garage and searched there for her. Always, if she is anyway near the garage, she will come to me. Not this time. I walked down to the barn and kept calling her name. In a time past, when she had been caught in the cupboard beneath my kitchen sink, I heard her sad meow and let here out. This time, in all my travels around my property, there was only the distant sounds of morning traffic on Highway 20.
I went back to the house, sat down and thought of all the possibilities Cleo might have met her end.
One: If she fell into my pond, before she drown, surely her natural urge to survive would teach her to swim to the bank.
Two: If she wandered into the road in front of my home she would leave a flat cat corpse behind. I looked but there was not even a grease spot on the road.
Three: I was growing senile. I had let her in the house and then forgot. I went through all the closed closets and cupboards just in case. She wasn’t there.
Four: A skunk or some predator got her. All I would find in the field next spring would be the remains of her furry skin. If that was the case it was much too late to do much for her.
Five: She ran off she deserved what she got.
I sat in my office of a mind to accept the loss of my friend. Trying to see the bright side, at least, I thought, I would no longer have to feed, pet, and care for that disobedient free spirit anymore. Besides, I still had Calico No. 2, sister to the original Calico I had and that died before I got Cleo at the SPCA.
Just then the boys from the Lucerne Roofing Company pulled up in their truck. They had come to fix a hole in my roof. The roof had been leaking for two years and I was tired of catching the drip after every rain in buckets.
I took Alberto and young Alberto, his son, around to the back of my house to show them where I thought the leak might be. As I stood there peering at the roof, I noticed an unusually large lump of furry moss growing on the roof. On closer inspection what should I see? It was not moss. It was Cleo. She had spent the night on the roof.
Why she was there and how she managed get up to the roof I may never know. Alberto offered to go up the ladder and bring her down. As sociable as Cleo is with strangers she would not get close enough for Alberto to catch her. I went up. I grabbed her as she hung with both claws for dear life, to me and to each ladder rung as I climbed down.
Cleo had spent all night draped over the sharp hip of my roof, probably awake in case she started to roll down. She followed me into the house, gave me a kitty kiss thank you, ate a bite of kitty bits and fell asleep on my bed.
For the next eight hours she lay on my bed while I worked. She was too exhausted from her ordeal to move a paw. Twice she asked to out but she was back each time in less than a minute. She wanted to make sure she really had a home. I think she was finally satisfied. The next time she goes on vacation and disappears I will look first on my roof. She was at my door an hour early that night.
Gene Paleno is an author and illustrator living in Witter Springs.
