It turns out that I am a bit of a doormat.

It took most of the last eighteen months to learn this about myself. Actually I am also married to a doormat, for it was his actions that led us on this passage of self and marital discovery. The tale involves an acquaintance who left the country suddenly and with her departure came the phone call announcing that her cat was left behind in her apartment about fifteen miles away and since we couldn't exactly be the type of people who can leave a cat trapped in an apartment, we wound up rescuing the cat and moving him into our apartment. It was supposed to have been a temporary arrangement, maybe a month or so and then the cat's owner promised she would come back for him. The first red flag should have been the cats name, "Probation", although he also answered to "Bugger".

I never met a cat I didn't like and he was no exception. His soft orange fur and beefy face quickly won me over. Our other two cats hated him on sight, but I knew they would adapt. I found that it was hard to yell "Probation" out my front door and even more impossible to call "Bugger", so I took to calling him a gentler sounding "orange cat" and he promptly learned my clicking call. I tried to insist that he would be an indoor cat and to his credit he did try to humor me for a little while, but it became apparent that he liked to roam. As soon as one of us opened up the door we would see an orange blur and he would race out into the parking lot. I could see that he had a healthy respect for cars, so I resigned myself to becoming his door woman.

When he was still a new visitor, he discovered the school bus stop and would plant himself nearby so that when the school bus arrived he would be right there to walk our middle daughter home from the corner. He was partial to chasing leaves and had an extremely playful nature. In the evenings he would come inside and liked to hang out next to me while I watched TV. When he grew tired of being indoors he would saunter up to the front door and throw his body against the doorknob until one of us would let him back outside.

We settled into our routines. A month passed and there was no word on his departure. A couple months in, we asked his owner to contribute to his upkeep and she did, still reassuring us that he would not be here forever.

In the meantime we were doing this crazy cat shuffle. Since our family pets did not get along with him, we could not leave any of them alone together. This challenge was exacerbated by the size of our living space (a small two bedroom apartment) which meant that Probie had to be in one room with the door closed while the other two had roam of the rest of the place, or our two cats had to be locked up while Probie explored the rest of the apartment. This was all made more complicated when it became obvious that all three cats wished they could follow me around. Whomever was locked up was often loudly miserable.

At some point my orange friend had his first run in with a neighbor cat. More months passed and a couple more big cat fights followed. Our neighbors announced that they were going to get a live trap and if Probie entered their property they would trap him and take him to the animal shelter. We pushed his owner for a solution and stepped up our cat security. This became something of a new game for him. If he saw one of us reach for a jacket or keys he would race to the door and wait. One of us had to hold him while the rest of us ran out and the last one out had to be ever vigilant of tricking him and keeping him inside. A few times we missed and he won some temporary freedom, but we got him back inside before anything happened to him. If anyone knocked at the door he would sneak behind the curtain and wait to try to make his escape. Keeping him in became a stressful job and we wondered how long we could keep at it.

Finally almost a year and a half after he moved in, we got word that there was another place for him. Arranged by a friend of his owner, we were told that the place was out in the country and sounded like it would be a good fit for him, so we drove him there last week. It looked okay and it seems he will have the run of a huge piece of land, but his days of sleeping inside just ended. He will be a barn cat now. I hear his owner is still promising she will soon return.

In the meantime I find myself still watching the corner when the school bus reaches the corner and I sigh when I realize he won't be racing home.