a blog in the dark
I'm sitting here blogging in bed because tonight a drama unfolded of epic proportions that rocked my tiny world. I could make this long story short but screw that. It all started about 2:00 in the afternoon when my friend Rita and I, upon checking the satellite map, noticed a hair-thin line of clouds forming down near Wichita, KS. As the afternoon went on this line of clouds grew into a squall line with severe potential that had been forecast the day before. We got excited as we always do when storms threaten. I was going to stop by the Apple Store on the Plaza on my way home to get me an iPad, but the sky was so dark and foreboding that I was afraid I'd get caught in a hailstorm on my way home if I did that, so I just went home. The system was moving in such a way that it was 8:00 in the evening before the weather began to show itself at my house in the south of Kansas City. When it really got cranking I got up to look out the window...tons of cloud to cloud lightning and it was just raining buckets, the gutters turned to rivers in the street. I decided to go down and open my garage to see what was going on. Little did I know the drama that this would start. First thing when I opened the door to my basement, I heard a kitten crying loudly. This surprised me, it sounded like it was right in my basement even though I knew that most likely it was in the window well, as a feral cat in the neighborhood has put her litters in there before. When I realized this, my heart sank. When it rains hard such as it was doing right now, my window wells fill with sometimes six to eight inches of water, as I live on a hill and have bad water drainage problems. I dashed to my living room and stuck my headlamp on my head, flew down the stairs, opened the garage door, grabbed my golf umbrella and a cardboard box. I ran around the house and knelt by the window well, my headlamp revealed four tiny less-than-a-week old kittens, soaking wet, screaming for their mother. I laid the box on it's side and fished the tiny kittens out of the well and put them in the box. I ran back to the basement. In some laundry on the floor was an old pair of flannel pants. I grabbed them, ran back to the kittens and frantically began drying them. They quieted down as I did this. I put the flannel on top of them and left them there, hoping their mom would rescue them. I spent an agonizing hour wondering if I did the right thing. Would their mother find them? Should I bring them inside and try to feed them myself? I didn't want to spend to much time outside for fear of scaring the mother away. I checked on them after an hour, still there huddled by themselves under the flannel. I waited another hour, checked again, still no change. Now I was beginning to worry. The rain had slacked off, the window well did NOT fill with water, and the mother was nowhere in sight. I began to be wracked with guilt as I realized these kittens were not going to make it through the night and it was partly my fault. After two and a half hours, knowing kittens need to be fed every two hours, I decided to put dry leaf-litter in the window well and replace the kittens, careful to cover them with the flannel. Another wait, 30 minutes. I went into the basement and shined the light in the well. I could see the flannel gently rising and falling, no sign of the mother. Three hours without food. I went dejectedly back upstairs and proceeded to cry my eyeballs out. If the kittens were older I might have been able to do something, if I could just give them some food and water but these were so tiny there was no way I could handle it, and I'd decided since they were feral I wouldn't interfere anymore anyway. I cried harder than I've cried in a very long time. I took some Benadryl to knock me out, for fear the incident would keep me awake, washed my face, brushed my teeth. I decided to check one last time. I went downstairs and shined a flashlight into the window well. I could see fur and was afraid the kittens had wandered out from under the flannel. But the fur filled the whole field of my flashlight, and then the fur hissed loudly at me. I couldn't believe it...the mother had returned! I instantly turned off the light so as not to disturb them and went upstairs, so completely relieved that I knew I would have to sit down and type this story out.