Moonlight

1.

When Moonlight showed up, one of the reasons we took her in was that Erik (my son) was five, and he figured that John was "our cat" and he wanted one for himself, to sleep in HIS bed.

Which Moonlight did, and still does, even when he's at college.

2.

My wife called me at work and asked what to do. I said, well, let her onto the porch for now, because it's snowing. (We have an enclosed front porch, what we call here "3-season).

So I got home, and couldn't decide, so we decided we'd leave her on the porch overnight anyway.

Well, our front door is a big oak thing, with windows that start 46" above the floor. A couple hours later, we're sitting in the living room and here this weird noise. We look, and here's here little cat head staring in the door window - she's jumped up, is holding on with her front paws, and doing a chin-up to look through the window. (This was about a 9mo old cat).

I told my wife "Well, hell, I've always had a weakness for black cats" and let her in.

3.

Anyway, when we adopted Moonlight, (a little all-black female who showed up on our porch, and may very well have ridden home with my wife by jumping into the car while my wife was loading groceries into it), she was almost a year old, with not much manners, which John proceeded to teach her. We have seen him yelling at her when she was somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. She learned about counters and tables without us doing much anything. (Though she also learned about dining room tables, but got exactly John's final and fully-evolved theory, which was "you are not allowed on the table when people are eating.")

Our (once junior, now senior) cat Moonlight once disappeared. She was gone for two days, three. We had posters around the neighborhood. About the third day we went and walked every street within four blocks of us, calling her, and looking around. She's a cat who's normal best attempt at a loud voice is a squeak you could barely hear over a computer fan. But maybe we heard something. Couldn't figure it out. After half an hour of going up and down the same block, what we found was this:

There was a house with a little shed roof over the built-in buffet (I have no idea if you'll know what I'm talking about unless you know twenties bungalows, but whatever) This roof is at a level just below second floor windows, and is two feet wide and 6 feet long, and Moonlight is sitting on it, feeling trapped.

What we figured out, once we found where she was, is that she had probably been chased by something awful probably a dog, and had run up a tree. Gone out on a branch, which led her to just over this roof. The roof looked more comfortable than sitting on a thin branch, so she got on the roof. The branch, weighed down by her, suddenly went up two feet higher. So having jumped a foot down from a little branch, to get down without jumping 15 feet straight down, she'd have to jump up 3 feet and land perfectly on a wiggle branch. So she was stuck, for about three days, in the middle of summer, a black cat on a hot (shingle) roof.

Anyway, we knocked on the door of the home owner, convinced her to let us into her upstairs bedroom (which had the window right above the little roof), opened the window, and coaxed her in, took her home (after many thanks), and watched her drink water for an hour.

4.

Moonlight is more sensible now - actually, one of the reasons we were so worried about her that she had as a two-year old or so this awful habit in the spring and fall when the temperature was right of going out and sleeping in the middle of our street. We still have her, so obviously she learned.

5.

She's a wonderful cat, very sweet, but bad on birds, and she has captured three bats in our attic.