And then they were gone

I sent yesterday's newsletter too soon, it seems. The situation with the kittens that someone left to die by our front door ended in an unexpected way.

It’s the last kitten story, I promise. Just want to share how it concluded.

Yesterday’s newsletter (I suggest you read it, if you haven’t yet, for context) was sent at 4:20 p.m. Just moments after that, Alex called out from the living room saying the kitten’s mother had found them.

Belly sagging… Yes, definitely a cat that gave birth recently. I should know. Our cat, Pepper, whom we had for over twelve years, gave birth twice and that was how her belly looked even weeks after.

So, mother cat stayed there for something like ten minutes. Then I saw her through the window in another part of the house. She had left the kittens.

A few minutes later, there was a commotion in front of our house. Alex said the kids in the neighborhood, home from school, passed by, saw the kittens and were asking if they were ours. She told them they weren’t.

I panicked a little when I saw them touching the kittens. I was worried they’d catch rabies, so I opened the front door and tried to tell them that it might be dangerous. But I couldn’t be heard. Our two dogs were barking so noisily you’d think zombies were trying to get in.

I closed the door and opened a window. I saw one young boy trying to turn a kitten on its back. Another was holding a black kitten that he picked up across the street. Apparently, between the time the mother cat left and the kids saw the kittens, the fourth one that we never saw crawl out of the jar did, in fact, crawl out and wobbled all the way across the street. That was when one of the little boys found him, picked him up and brought him over thinking it was ours and it had escaped.

Obviously, the children wanted the kittens for their pets. Four kittens. And there were two boys and two girls who first saw them. I told them to go ask their mommies first. If they said yes, they could take the kittens.

The children disappeared for a while. We were in the midst of setting the table for our aftertoon merienda when there was a ruckus outside. The four kids brought with them even more kids and they were all touching the kittens. Even before I could warn them to be careful, a kid picked up a kitten, a second scooped out another, and so on, and so forth until, finally, there were neither kittens nor children to be seen nor heard.