It Takes a Village to Save a Cat

Before I left Italy, our neighbor friend Claudia had readily agreed to help me find a home for the cat. I told her that if she did not find one, I would somehow bring Gattina to Florida. In the meantime, Claudia or her husband fed the cat daily. 

Every morning as my Florida cats howled for their breakfast, I first checked my phone for a message from Claudia. I had emailed her some pictures of Gattina. She sent one to a mutual friend who owns a restaurant and displayed it “for adoption” at their cash register. Another photo went to an animal group Claudia knows. 

Our workers were at the house. I wondered if they fed her, or petted her, or stepped on her. I worried about the rubble pile, her safe haven. They would soon remove it; the backhoe was staged when we left. 

A week passed. Gattina came around every time Claudia arrived to feed her. I researched the labyrinthine requirements to bring a cat to Florida. At minimum, I would have to change my return ticket and stay longer. 

Two weeks before we returned to Italy, I got an email from Claudia. She had asked her friend Mary, a fellow animal lover, for ideas for our cat. Mary spoke to the couple who own the horse farm where she rides and they agreed to take her. After visiting the vet and getting her shots, she would join a dog and another rescue cat and get trained to be around horses. The couple would feed and care for her and she would have a warm dry place to call home.  

When we pulled into our driveway she ran toward us. She still climbed my legs and walked between them. She still slept in the nearest window, and were it not for our screens, she would have walked inside. She still jumped in my lap. 

I spoke to her in Italian so she would understand her new cat mom and dad. She played with the sprinkler flags planted in the ground and walked on our furniture like she owned it. I tried in vain to teach her to walk alongside me.

A few days before we would leave Italy and Gattina, we lured her out of her hiding spot down the road and Claudia and I took her to the vet. She howled in Claudia’s cat carrier for the twenty minute drive.

The vet gently lifted Gattina from the carrier and frowned as her hands felt around the trembling cat. She shook her head, speaking in Italian to Claudia. “She’s pregnant,” I said, recognizing the word. Claudia nodded, her lips pursed. Since about the time she found us for food. “She’s too thin,” the vet said and put Gattina back in the carrier and opened her datebook. Her first availability to spay Gattina was in a few days. I would be in Florida. Claudia would have to coax her from her den. 

I said goodbye to Gattina on our patio. I gave her a lot of pork leftovers, petted her, and told her to be good for her new mommy. My tears dropped onto the terracotta tiles. 

The day of her operation I kept one eye on my email. It had taken Claudia an hour to get the cat out of hiding and into the carrier, but her surgery went fine. She would recuperate at the vet’s office for a two days, then Mary would pick her up and keep her for a few weeks. 

Claudia forwarded me Mary’s first update on Gattina, she was wondering what to call her. Claudia asked if she could name her Ellie. At Mary’s house, Ellie had her own bathroom and even jumped to sleep in a basket in the windowsill. The vet came to Mary’s house to give Ellie her vaccinations and she would rest at Mary’s for a couple of weeks before going to the horse farm.

Just before Mary was to bring Ellie to the farm, Karen, a expat friend of Mary’s fell in love with Ellie and wanted her. So Ellie joined three other cats in Karen’s house with a cat door and no cars nearby to worry about. The last I heard, Ellie was eating like a horse, playing with the beaded curtains, and impatiently waiting for permission to play outside. I’d like to think she sleeps in the windowsill. 

• For the beginning of this story, read My Italian Cat.
• To see our vacation house in Le Marche, visit Casa Pace e Gioia.