If we thought making the decision to sell our Czech Republic furniture was emotional, it didn’t hold a candle to the grief in finding new homes for our beloved cats. We’ve loved those cats ever since we carefully and thoughtfully picked them from a litter of kittens at our neighbor’s house back in May 2002. That’s a long time. That’s well over nine years. Though I’ve had animals since I was a very young child, I’ve never had a pet this long.
Our options were severely limited in finding new homes for them. Alex’s girlfriend Amanda is very allergic to cats so they couldn’t take Cassie and Sasha. Paul’s family already has a dog and a cat. We talked to neighbors, but ours is a very cat-heavy neighborhood, and no one had room.
Shelters are full to capacity these days with all the animals being left behind from foreclosures. Most shelters never even returned my calls. So we got our information together, chose some wonderful photos of each cat, and posted on Craigslist, amidst dozens of other postings.
Amazingly enough we got a response on each cat the very next morning. We wrote back, got the information, and looked up the addresses on Google street view. We cried. We just couldn’t see our cats going to a physical situation like that, especially since they have such a perfect situation here.
The good news is that we were spared the decision, because after saying yes initially, each of the two respondents backed out within a few days.
Then a week later we got another email. The new person called us to talk things over, and within two hours she was at the house. Patti admitted that when she saw Cassie’s photo she knew immediately that Cassie was the cat she wanted. We fell in love with Patti, and even Cassie got calm when Patti arrived (Cassie was utterly insulted and annoyed at being stuck in a cat carrier).
Life was so different without Cassie! She was more my cat; we had bonded very deeply from the beginning. She’d spend hours on the couch next to me, snoring away while I’d read at night, and keeping the couch occupied when I was otherwise busy. Life seemed much, much emptier.
It was such a relief to have one cat find a wonderful home, but we still had another cat. We started putting the word out everywhere, with no results. Meanwhile we were getting email responses through Craigslist from animal rights activists, telling us what we were doing was so wrong, detailing all the abuses poor innocent animals are subjected to when they are given away like this. Very helpful and very uplifting.
Two weeks went by.
I finally remembered that we had met a lovely woman in the spring through Freecycle. She’s a cat lover, and had come to pick up our Lillian Jackson Braun “Cat Who” series in paperback. We’d spent a few hours talking, and she met our cats. On a hunch, I emailed her again and told her about Sasha. She responded immediately and posted the ad on her Facebook page.
So help me, we had an email the next day, and Sasha had a new home four days later (the new family also told us that they knew when they saw Sasha’s photos that they wanted her specifically).
We’ve heard from each family several times and each family has reported that they love their respective cat and that each cat is very happy. We are thrilled, needless to say, especially after how much we agonized over having to leave them.
Meanwhile I still hear phantom cat doors opening and closing. I round a corner and expect to see Cassie. I’m sure Sasha is chasing a lizard on the porch. I toss a shirt on the bed, then catch it mid-air knowing that’s where the cat hair is, right there on that corner.
It’s hard to express how much love and laughter and joy those two little kitties brought into our lives.
Though the immediacy of missing them has faded some over the last two months, I still get teary easily when I think of them. I had to change my Picasa screensaver to not use photos of the cats because it’s still too painful to see them in living color meandering across my screen.
But life moves on, and we are moving on. We know both cats are in wonderful situations where they are loved. We can’t do better than that.
Now that the cats are gone, it’s more real than ever that we are tossing over all we know and love in exchange for years on the road on bicycles. Wow. The cats are gone. Now it’s real.