Animal Stories
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 10:58AM 
Lately, I’ve been overrun by animals. There are my own three—the golden retriever and two cats—and last week, there were three more.
There’s Ned, who has been with us for over a month now while his family travels. He’ll be going home on Thursday, and I’ll miss him. If I’d known that he weighed 120 lbs., wasn’t leash trained, and drooled, I might not have taken him in, but I’d have missed out on a whole lot of good fun.
Ned is half rottweiler and half golden retriever, with a 100% rottweiler build. But his heart? Pure golden. He wakes up bouncy every morning—like Tigger, really: “Oh good! Another beautiful day! What will we do for fun today?” If I were to name his favorite activities, I’d say it’d be going for a walk—in places where he doesn’t need to be leashed, of course—and riding in the car.
Yesterday I opened the trunk of my car to put some more bags of recycling in when Ned came bounding across the yard, jumping, all 120 lbs, into my trunk where he sat atop the heaps of bags of recycling stuff with a goofy grin on his face. He wanted, I’m guessing, to make sure he wasn’t left behind.
He’s nine years old, but he’s still a puppy. He does enthusiastically foolish things to entertain me almost every day. And he adores me, so I can’t help but love him right back.
And then there are the kittens. They showed up on Tuesday afternoon while I was having my new furnace installed. There were people in and out all day and two kittens bouncing around the yard. They seemed to have come from down the street in the direction of the dead end, but the families in the three houses down there were all gone on holidays. Wherever they came from, they didn’t go back home, but slept the whole night in the adirondack chair on the front porch.
By Wednesday, we’d concluded they were litter left-overs dumped in the woods beside my house by a cruel owner. The sons begged me to feed them, but I refused. I did not want to become the crazy cat-lady of Hillcrest.
But by that night, I’d had pity on them and oldest son took the two, along with an old paint tray, an extra bag of litter and some canned food my persnickety cats won’t eat, to his house downtown. There, they wreaked havoc for two days and kept him awake for two nights. A pair of kittens, he’s concluded, are totally cute and thoroughly evil.
Thankfully, the kitty-cats are now back with their rightful owners, the family three houses down, who returned home from a month-long holiday to find that the house-sitter had accidently let the children’s precious pets out and had been unable to find them anywhere. How the sitter could have missed those two chasing each other around our yard for a day and a half, I’ll never know, but I am very happy they’re back home with the children who love them.
Ned, I’ll miss. Those rascally kitties, not so much.
