Rosendale Ramblings By Sari Botton

Yesterday morning, the doorbell rang at 8 a.m. Startled, I peeked through the curtains and saw a familiar, slightly off-kilter woman. I’ve seen her before, walking up and down Main Street, shouting at no one in particular. On this particular morning, her bushy red hair was pushing out from under not one but two fishing hats, stacked one on top of the other. She was pacing nervously. I was a little afraid to open the door.

I pried the inner one open a little, and left the glass storm door closed.

“What happened?!” She demanded. “What happened?!” Her eyes were wet. She was pointing wildly to the area at the front of our property where we’d recently dug up 10 quince bushes that had been serving as a hedge.

“We planted them in the back,” I said, assuming she was asking about the bushes – not a totally far-fetched assumption considering that last summer another woman in town had scolded us for not trimming them as nicely as the prior owner used to.

“What happened?!” the woman asked more urgently. Again, I told her, “We moved the quince bushes to the back yard.” I was starting to get annoyed, when she pointed more specifically to a spot near the end of the driveway.

“No, not that. THAT.”

And there it was, grey and fluffy. And dead. It was one of the neighborhood cats that we had sometimes seen in our back yard. While his body was not far from the road, it didn’t seem as if he’d been hit by a car. There was no blood, no limbs out of place. He was just curled up, on his side, peaceful, like he had fallen asleep and neglected to get up. Could it have been that there was no violence, no road-crossing drama, that the cat just knew it was its time and chose our yard as a transfer point to the sweet hereafter?

“He was my buddy. He was my buddy!” The woman-child exclaimed, verging on hysterics. “I don’t know whose cat he was, but he was my buddy!”

I stood in the doorway, dumbstruck. “Oh my god,” I said. “I have no idea what happened. I’m so sorry.”

“Take care of him, please?” she begged.

“Yes, of course,” I said, although I had no idea what “taking care of him” would entail. “Don’t worry,” I told her.

My husband, Brian, came downstairs and I filled him in. Neither one of us had any clue what “taking care” entailed. Were we supposed to give this cat we barely knew a proper burial? Wouldn’t the owners want to do that themselves? How would we find the owners, and until we did, what should we do with this decomposing corpse? Or were we supposed to just shovel him into a garbage bag and cart him off to the town dump? What were the spiritual implications? The sanitational?

What do you do when an animal expires on your lawn? We’re new to small town home ownership. I don’t think this is covered in the manual.