Cup O’ Joe: The Cat’s Meow

Two weeks ago, I came home from covering a music event at Houlton High School and heard a strange meowing coming from outside. Thinking it was a neighborhood cat and not one of our two cats, I shrugged it off.
    But as I walked toward the house the meows became much louder and desperate sounding. I knew it had to be our kitten. The weather had been getting warmer and my wife decided it was a good idea to let our two cats out to play. Our older cat has been with us for probably four or five years and had been out around our yard all last summer. The second cat is more of a kitten, probably 6 months old or so, and had not been outside before, except in a cat carrier.
I started looking under the car and the porch to no avail when I hear a voice from inside say, “Yeah, he’s up the tree.”
Not only was the kitten up the tree, he was way up the tree and not reachable by any ladder I owned. Since it was getting darker out, we made a few calls to places that we thought would be able to help to no avail. When the kitten had not come down by 8 p.m., I gave Heather Miller from the Houlton Humane Society a call. She offered some helpful suggestions like trying to place a can of food on one of the lower branches and reassured me that even though it was cold out, chances are he would be fine and likely come down on his own.
So we had no choice but to leave the kitten up the tree. It was a restless night for sure as every so often I would be awakened by the sound of him meowing. I woke up around 6 a.m. to find that it had started raining heavily. I fully expected to go out and find a lifeless cat on the ground from having fallen out of the tree. To my surprise, he was still very much alive, and still very much stuck near the top of the tree. And likely down one of his nine lives.
My father showed up with a few friends and a phone call was made to a person (who wishes to remain anonymous) with a bucket truck to rescue the cat. Surprisingly, the kitten came right to the man trying to reach him and was extracted from the tree without incident.
Now, I don’t know how cats think, but I would assume after spending a rainy night in the tree, this kitten would think twice about going outside again. Wrong. Every opportunity he gets, he goes to the door and tries to get outside. Entering the house is now something of a game as we try to outwit the kitten.
Not two days after his overnight incident, the kitten lost life No. 8 as he tried climbing into a cold air return duct for our heating system. The grate to the register was removed as we were in the process of refinishing the kitchen floor. I managed to see him start his climb into the register and somehow managed to grab his tail just before he disappeared into the ductwork. The extraction wasn’t pretty, but I managed to get him out and only had a few scratches to show for it.
I have to back up a bit. I am not a huge animal person. I had a couple of pets growing up, but they either ran away or died when I was very young. Several years ago, my wife decided we needed pets after our first child was born. I was against the idea since we were planning on having a second child. But nonetheless, I came home from work one day and there was a cat.
I was not amused and I don’t think we spoke for a couple of days. My daughter, who was maybe 3 years old at the time, named the cat “Meow Meow,” since that was what the cat did whenever you touched it. That cat actually turned out to be not that bad, probably because it was an older cat. Either way, the cat stayed off areas where it was not supposed to be on and only scratched a few areas it shouldn’t have before we trained it not to.
A couple of years after our second daughter was born, talks began about getting a kitten. Once we moved back to Houlton and bought a house, those talks resumed and the kids also got involved. “Please, Daddy can we get a kitten?” as if my opinion really mattered.
Sure enough, I came home from work and saw a new, very tiny kitten in the house. (Maybe I should stop going off to work?)
My daughters named the new cat “Mittens,” while I lobbied for “Shadow.” I don’t know if it’s because he’s a kitten or just plain feisty, but this cat has been pure trouble. Even my wife is rapidly losing patience with the creature. He climbs everywhere we don’t want him to, fights constantly with the older cat, and has been a pain in the butt nearly from Day One.
My wife says she’s “had it” with the cat, and wants to see it go to a new home. I’m thinking she’s just laying the foundation for her bigger plan to get a dog, which means I may have to start working from home.
Joseph Cyr is a staff writer for the Houlton Pioneer Times. He can be reached at 532-2281 or pioneertimes@ nepublish.com.