I suddenly realized tonight that Miss Zoomalot (my CH cat) wasn't racing along behind me as I walked towards the bedroom with her's and Ginger's food. After an hour of increasingly frantic and moving to hysterical search of the house, every cupboard, cranny, drawer, then impossible places like the fridge and oven, I didn't know what to do. I imagined her stuck somewhere in the house that I couldn't find and that one day I would find her body - you know the kind of thing, some of you have been there, I'm sure. I checked outside but I knew I'd closed the child gate at the front of the entrance before I'd opened the door to come in from gardening.
Then I remembered that I'd let them all out on the top back deck earlier (three stories up because my house is on a steep hill) and closed the door a few hours before. I knew then, with horror and certainty, that she had to have fallen from the deck. I have net over half of it and planks of wood set against the slats of the other half to prevent her from falling, but I knew the planks weren't really enough. I'd become complacent because she's been out there many times without incident, and she has become more stable as she became a young adult. Shaking with fear, sure that I would find her broken and dead or dying body by the back deck and imagining racing to the emergency vet, I pulled on boots, grabbed two flashlights and ran round the side of the house. Half way down the hill, I saw her huddled into the side of the house and realized she was alive. She didn't move as I approached or scooped her up, which really frightened me, and as I burst back into the house, heading for the bathroom to check her out, I was thinking of everything from internal injuries to a broken spine.
Amazingly, utterly amazingly, and I don't deserve such good fortune, she seems to be fine. In fact, she's on the carpet behind me finishing her dinner. I will be watching her very carefully for the next few days, alert to any sign of injury, but the signs are good so far. For a regular cat to fall from such a height can be dangerous because the lower deck is right beneath and they could hit the top rail of it. For a cat who has trouble landing well from the top of a climber, it's incredible that she appears to have landed without obvious injury.
One thing became very obvious to me as I searched for her and that is that I have come to really love this little cat. I didn't want to imagine life without her. For those of you that love pictures (most of you), I've included a baby picture. I haven't taken any recently because I'm hoping the ringworm scars across her face with eventually go away. She's the black one.
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Merry Holidays to One an All Blessed be 
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