* Part Two
** As realized by my son
*** Luna, by the way, is my kitty
“she departed and wandered in the Wilderness…”
Genesis 21:14
~
We’ve had our sweet Luna for less than a year. We adopted her from the shelter last July, and it’s been a little tricky getting to know her. By that I mean that she’s very unlike our last kitty, Hazel, who died almost a year ago. Hazel was very mellow and docile. A cuddler and a meow-er. I’ve always loved talkative kitties with loud purrs.
Luna, by contrast, is a bit more of a spitfire, at least where the dog is concerned. Hazel would walk the long way so as to not be noticed by the dog, and was not a creature to push her luck in any way. She liked to go outside in our backyard, but only to sit on a patio chair in the sun. An hour or so later she would come back in. That’s all the exploration she wanted.
Luna hasn’t spent much time outside. We want our cat to be an indoor cat (coyotes are sometimes seen in our neighborhood) but Luna wants to go outside. She sits in open windows, and if she hears the back door open, she skulks carefully toward it, seemingly hoping we won’t notice her. The one or two times I took her outside with me, to see how she’d react, I quickly took her back in. She was clearly eyeing the top of the fence, looking for escape routes. So we got more cautious about making sure she didn’t sneak out.
Until she did. A couple of weeks ago she was gone for 24 hours, despite several searches, and calling her and making general food-rattling noises all around the house. And when she was back home, safe and sound, it was not due to her decision to return to a place of warmth and food, but due to our kids, who kept looking until they found her. She was next door in our neighbor’s yard, hiding behind boards and gardening supplies.
See, the thing is, she’s a bit of a coward. She is very wary of our dog ~ as was Hazel ~ but she manifests it with a lot of hissing and general threatening. Sort of, “the best defense is a good offense,” I guess. But she also jumps when someone sneezes, or when she hears voices outside. She’s skittish and nervous.
And yet she wants to go outside. Why? The 24 hours she spent outside, she was hungry, and cold and I daresay, scared. So why didn’t she come home? And why did she want to go out in the first place? And why does she still want to go back outside?
This was the conversation my son and I were having, just a few days after her escapade. We were petting her, and glad she was back home, and wondering all that, and then he shrugged and said, “Why do any of us want to do what’s not good for us?”
True words. Wise kid. Silly kitty.
Light Expectations 