I’ve revealed in previous blog posts that it’s tough to leave my cats at home alone when I go off to work.
But I feel ten times worse when I go away for a weekend or a holiday break. I wish I could take them with me, but I fear a journey would be more traumatic than simply leaving them alone for days at a time.
When we go away, we usually leave them a huge bowl of food, fill up their “kitty waterfall” water dish, leave the windows open a crack and change the litterbox. We also leave out old sweatshirts or clothing items that smell like us—that way they won’t miss our scent!
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I traveled to Florida to visit with my father-in-law and his wife, Mary. Mary is a longtime GUIDEPOSTS reader, as is her 100-year-old mother, whom everyone calls Gram. Gram has been reading GUIDEPOSTS since the start of the magazine, back in 1945!
She’s very active for her age, and loves to crochet. She sends us a beautiful woven blanket every year. This year, she found herself left with a lot of spare yarn, and decided to crochet mini-blankets for all the cats in the family. (Almost all of her children and grandchildren have cats, including us!)
When we visited Gram one afternoon, I was particularly worried about my cats. I didn’t say anything, but it must have shown somehow, because the first thing Gram did when we got there was give us the cat blankets.
No sooner did we get home from Florida, than we had to turn around and start packing for Thanksgiving upstate with our families. That left us one measly day to be with the cats. I laid out the cat blankets for them hoping it would provide some comfort in our absence.
My worries were short-lived, it turns out. Not even two seconds after I laid the cat blankets out, I took this picture:
There were my cats, snoring away! The blankets were a real hit.
In fact, when we returned from the Thanksgiving holiday, they were still camped out on the cat blankets. Amazing!
I know I’ll never really be cured of my concern at leaving my cats alone, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one looking out for them.
—Jessica Bloustein
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