Home 2020

A  couple of months ago today, I was headed to the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop, somewhere on I-74, listening to a Maeve Binchy book and dreaming of my new adventure.  That’s when it happened -- I got the call.  My husband was calling, mid-afternoon -- alarming anytime, but more so today.  Who died or what couldn’t he find -- equally possible -- and the dreaded thought -- what can I do about it in the middle of Indiana? I answered the phone and a sinking feeling set in as he said, “ I wasn’t sure if I should bother you...but…”.  Nothing prepared me for what he said next.  “I think there is a cat in the furnace, listen to this.”  The next thing I heard him say was, “Kitty, kitty” and that cat called back with an anxious “MEOW, MEOW”...Holy Catastrophe, we have a cat in the furnace!!! My first thought was this thing was going to die in our furnace and the smell of a dead animal would permeate our house.  My next thought was, oh crap,  now we need to buy a new furnace -- sorry, I didn’t really think about the poor cat first - just my horror. The thoughts in my head were racing through all of the bad ways this thing could go -- and it dawned on me -- my husband was looking for me to help him figure out what to do.  I was 400 miles away in a car headed to Dayton, Ohio and I felt helpless. Where do you start? Stunned, I asked, “How do you think it got there?” This story started a few days earlier when our scruffy, Jack Russell terrier, Ernie who was protecting our house from critters, chased it onto our roof.  He was going crazy barking...