The splurges we never thought we’d make

I never thought I’d spend my money on...

… saving a cat from death row.

MY

husband loves animals. Me? Not so much. So when he brought home a supersized bag of cat food from Costco to feed the feral cat in our backyard, I wasn’t surprised. My kids quickly fell in love with “Socks,” and sensing a losing battle, my only rule was “Not in the house.”

Much to my chagrin, Socks (and her eventual kittens) became a novelty in my development, and kids often stopped by to visit. Unbeknownst to me, my neighbor wasn’t happy with Socks’s new home, and called Animal Control, who rounded up Socks when we weren’t home. While I was a little annoyed at my neighbor for overstepping, I was looking forward to no longer being the neighborhood’s “crazy cat house,” so all was well… until my five-year-old came home from school.

Heartbroken is an understatement. We said that Socks was visiting a cousin in Cleveland to stop him from asking after her, but he was really affected by the cat’s absence. He kept crying… he wouldn’t eat, he struggled to sleep, he kept checking out our back window to see if Socks had come home yet. After watching our son suffer for a few days, we had to get Socks back.

It took us two days to track Socks down. You’d think that an overcrowded animal shelter would be happy to give up the unwashed, tick-infested feral cat that they planned on euthanizing to someone who wanted it, but that wasn’t the case. We had to show pictures and videos to prove she was “ours.” We had to pay a “lodging fee” for the week they kept her, an “adoption evaluation fee” to see if we were a qualified “furr-ever home,” and a “recovery fee” to pay Animal Control back for taking her from our backyard in the first place. We paid more in money and agmas nefesh than that cat was worth… but the look of joy and relief on my son’s face was priceless.

—Rachelli