Not my own anxiety. This was an externalized one. In a form of a cat.
This is a no-cat house. No-cat backyard at that. Not my rules, but it just is what it is. Not to point any fingers, but we have 'some' anti-cat people in this household (khem)youdidn'thearitfromme(khem)mom(khem).
So I hear this ungodly kerfuffle outside.. something, that I've learned throughout the years - for the most part does not mean what it sounds like, but.. curiosity.. (not to go with a bad cat-related idiom here..) took the better of me and I volunteered to investigate what that commotion was all about.
Surely enough I find mom up in arms about an alleged cat that's still on the premises. That's odd, I think to myself, they usually take off immediately, faced with mom's fury, but ok. I'm tasked with clearing the parameter. I'm pointed in the general direction of a hedge as its location and I go in to investigate.
Sure enough, there's a fluff-ball laying in the hedge, not spooked by my approach, not running away, just letting me know it's not a fan of this whole situation by whisking about its tail. I try to reason with it. Explaining the situation. It's not amused, but also not budging. Mom suggests not speaking to it in English, I reason, it's a cat it doesn't care what language I use.
Then I go on and explain to the cat that if it's going to act like a baby, then I will be forced to treat it like a baby, and lifted it by the scruff of its neck out of the hedge moma-cat style. He did protest verbally, something, something in the lines of how humiliating it is to be treated this way, and that, no, it is not a baby anymore, but other than that he was quite civil with me. I took him outside of the premises and thought to myself, well, a job well done and put it on the ground just outside the fence.
Little did I know that it would bolt right back into the backyard, to hide in different bushes! Unexpected plot twist is unexpected!
Now I've got A for a back-up. I explained that I used the moma-cat move that took the cat by surprise before and that this time around it might suspect the move and try and protect itself, which it did and went full ham on A not wasting any scratches. Off we all run to the next corner of the backyard, now under the goat willow.. not the best spot to hide, if you ask me, it is no bush after all.
I instruct A to go patch himself up, as he's bleeding from the scratches on the hand and as I'm by the cat trying to talk some sense into him, mom has the genius idea to grab a box.. I mean, she said it herself afterwards, no normal cat would just sit there and wait to get a box put over it.. but this one, we figure, did not have much outside experience and thus had little to no self-preservation instinct. We literally did the - grab a glass and a paper move on a spider - but on a cat, scootching the box with the cat on a piece of wood, lifting the whole contraption, getting it outside of the backyard, this time ensuring we get the gates closed before it manages to dart back in.
It did look back twice, before it ran off, but I told him not to even think about it. There are several cats that move about freely around these parts and may stray in, but they know better, spook easily and have no issues leaping over fences to save their skin, so that's the 'norm' that we've used to here - just spook them and they'll run off to mind their own business. This however looked like such a house cat with zero survival skills, we've never seen it before and have no idea how it would have ended up here.
The more we reflect on the whole ordeal the worse we feel, at least me and A, as we're no cat-haters after all, and this one, in retrospect was clearly in distress, and not just your regular - Don't mind me, I'll just poop in your greenhouse - kind of 'guest'.
I hope it finds its way back home safely.
~Josie~