This was very nearly one of those heart-wrenching, tragic posts that I hate to write. I worried all day that it would be. I walked the neighborhood until my feet hurt and the sun made me sick. I spent the remainder of my time staring out the front and back windows, waiting to see a little blur of black and white bounding across my yard, acting like nothing was wrong. I had a really good cry in the shower.
Around 6 pm, after I had driven circles around the neighborhood because I could no longer deal with the sun, I had given up and was lying on my bed, wondering how I was going to live without my Bunny Boy, when the Mr came home. I did what I often do: paused the television and got up to have a conversation with him. Before my feet hit the hallway, there was Alfred, dancing circles around my ankles, wondering why he had to skip dinner...and breakfast...and dinner again. I nearly threw up in relief. And then I fed him a mountain of canned cat food, and later when he wasn't full, I gave him a handful of crunchies.
He has scared me like this before, but this is the longest he has ever been missing. I had gone so far as to register him as lost on the microchip website, and the Mr had gone to the humane society looking to see whether he had been picked up in one form or another (shudder). But then this evening, when he drove up with a truck full of cardboard to toss in the recycle bin, he drove down the alley first. He was putting the cardboard in the bin when he heard frantic meowing. Alfred was in a neighbor's yard, unable to get over his fence to come home. We theorize that he had wandered in through an open garage and gotten stuck overnight. We had combed the alley over and over, but he never meowed until that moment.
It was all I could do to leave him behind and go next door for game night. Normally games are here, but I was so physically and emotionally drained I just couldn't deal with cleaning for company. I determined, as I was trying to find a good picture of him to update the chip website, that I don't take nearly enough pictures of him. I think Harvey gets the most (which is common when you have a kitten, I'm sure), and Rabbit the next. The two black girls get some pictures, but lighting is tough on them. I wonder whether it's because Alfred is in constant motion and he often shows up as a blur. I plan on changing that pattern. I was afraid today that I would never get pictures of him again. He's going to get lots of new ones, starting with the ones from the kitchen tonight.
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