I had insomnia last night. I woke up from a sound sleep at 3:46 and could not get back to sleep. So I decided to get up for a while. I noticed from the bathroom window that it had snowed during the night, and I wanted a better look. I headed to the front door and turned on our outside light, a perspective from which I could see the it was still snowing; everything looked soft around the edges in the outside world.
I was standing in my bathrobe, staring in a half-daze, when I saw a large creature walk lithely down our driveway and take a turn onto the sidewalk. By the time she had begun her trot up the walkway I could tell it was a cat: a large, gray, well-fed cat. She walked right up our front steps and stopped to cast a look directly at me. We stared at each other for a while until she leaped off of the stairs and into the bushes.
I tracked the cat's path and headed towards our back door just in time to see her run through the yard towards one of our big pines. I quickly pulled on my blue, polka-dotted rain boots and went outside in order to find her. i was thinking that no cat should be outside in the snow.
I stood in the yard for a while in my bathrobe and blue rubber boots while snow gently fell on my shoulders. I quietly called pss-pss-pss and nch-nch-nch to try to call her out from her hiding place. The world held the quiet of a snowstorm at 4am; there was no sign of my gray, feline friend. It suddenly occurred to me that I may have entirely imagined this creature into existence, or that she was an other-worldy cat called to send me a message.
The feeling was haunting and beautiful.
I decided to go inside and read Banana Yoshimoto until I could fall back to sleep.
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Hi Amy,
I saw your blog about the cat in the snow and I had to forward you this picture that my dad sent me last week. Mooch is this funny cat they have now that came out of the woods a couple years ago - he was skinny and scrawny like a stray, but friendly and loving like a house cat. He quickly ingratiated himself with each of the three families on the Ridge, and before long, they all discovered that he was being fed separately at each house and each family had a name for him - my parents called him Mooch, the Wedebergs called him Elmer, and the Attlesons called him something in Spanish, I can't remember. He started fighting with the tomcats at the barn, and every other week he'd be limping or bleeding and everyone was so worried about him that the biggest tomcat was actually deported from the farm and taken to another farm in order to stop the fighting. After my parents housecats died (both in the past few months), they started letting Mooch come into the house in the evening - not at night - just to visit each afternoon. He kind of acts like a dog - he meets my dad every day at the end of the driveway where the garage is and walks with him to the house. After the big snowstorm a couple weeks ago, my parents went snowwshoeing about a half mile out on the ridge, and Mooch walked with them the whole way - up and down the snowdrifts, following in their footsteps.
Cats in the snow!
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