Miss Sassy Pants

There is never a dull moment when you live, breathe, sleep, and work in a church for the summer.  There always seems to be new challenges arising, from overflowing toilets, to kids getting injured, to bad weather cramping a worksite's style.  Last week, I had to take my car across the street to get it state inspected. So Sunday night I headed out the door to my car.  I had seen our neighborhood skunk slink by the door earlier in the evening and purely as a precautionary measure I looked under the cars I had to pass to get to the green bullet.  Huddled under one car was the body of a small animal.... Just as I was convinced it was the skunk and I needed to steer clear, a loud and repetitive meow came from beneath the car and a very small, very young cat emerged in distress.  She came right up to me and started rubbing against my legs.  Remembering that someone was following me over in another car to bring me back from the shop, I unwillingly left the cat alone until I came back to the church.

And so entered into my life, Miss Sassy Pants, named because of her constant meow and desire for love and attention.  It looks like Miss Sassy was just dumped at or around the church, she clearly was not used to the outdoors and she was loving and gentle and friendly to everybody. I stayed with her as long as I could that first night, giving her a little bit of milk and bacon (the best our camp kitchen has to offer a feline!) and was devastated the next morning when I couldn't find her.

But the next night she was back, and she hung out quite calmly and comfortably as I chatted on the phone for a bit.

Miss Sassy was around for a few days, and I started to put out feelers to shelters around Virginia to find someone or someplace that could take her.  By Wednesday someone else from around the church had left a plate of cat food out for her and by that evening she was gone.

I'm pretty sure Miss Sassy was taken into a good home, but it was a pretty sweet gift to have a cat around the place for a few days.  There is a tribe of wild cats that live in the woods behind the church, but they run at the first sight of people...not my kind of cat at all!