Happy August, Team TNR!

There are as many ways to savor summer as there are children under the sun. (That includes all of us: young, forever young, feline, and otherwise.)

Whether you prefer parasailing down the Riviera or just watching the fireflies on your own front stoop, I hope joy is singing your name.

You are the reason a certain summer “baby” can hear the music of her own name. Although she is at least fourteen, Piper is learning to be a kitten for the very first time.

First trapped many summers ago, Piper has been on our TNR roster longer than some of our volunteers have been on Earth. After being spayed and vaccinated, she found a safe outdoor haven in South Jersey.

But while most of our colony cats remain “in the neighborhood,” the little loner chose her own path, never to be seen again. As always in such cases, we yearned to know she was safe and prayed she had found kindness.

We did not expect to hear from her a decade later.

But summer has more secrets than grains of sand on the seashore.

When the call came in from down the Shore, it took a few moments to process what we were hearing. A cat with a Tabby’s Place microchip had turned up as a stray. She was about fourteen, but she looked more like forty.

It had clearly been a cruel summer, as she was emaciated, anemic, blind, and in agony from deep ear infections.

Did we want her?

The question was answered before it was asked. Once a Tabby’s Place cat, always a Tabby’s Place cat. Feral, huggable, wizened or newborn, if you belong to us, you belong to love.

And you, dear sponsors, are the soul of this promise.

Thanks to you, we had the resources to wrap Piper in our care, just in time. A selfless volunteer raced to retrieve her, and our vet team tended to Piper’s (many) urgent needs.

Moving as gently and delicately as sunlight on the water, they shaved her painfully matted thatches of fur. Piper was in such fragile health, she would need a skilled foster parent to shepherd her through the touch-and-go early weeks of recovery. She found her angel in our vet tech Drew, who was tireless in her tenderness and unmatched in her care.

And today, Piper is learning love’s tune.

It is the song of the summer.

Having never been socialized to people, our dainty lady is wary. What strange place is this, where people refill your bowl no matter how much you glower and growl? Who are these peculiar overgrown children, who took her hair (how funny it must feel to groom your shorn belly!) but who keep giving her treats…and time…and that soft word, Piper, over and over, as though it were the sweetest name on Earth?

Yet, as she gains strength and ounces, Piper is visibly wonderstruck. We are witnessing a cat coming back to life. Her eyes and ears are open again. Her pain is receding like the tide. Her last lonely summer is behind her. The time of coconut-shaped beds and cheeseburger-flavored treats has begun.

It is not too late to become young.

Sweet sponsors, I can’t thank you enough for being Piper’s people. Without you, she would never have seen September. But here you are, and here she is, and here is the reason we were all put here under the sun together.

Love.

May the rest of your August abound in tender mercies. I am so grateful you’re part of our Tabby’s Place family.

With love and gratitude,
your correspondent,
Angela