Boomerang

Were you aware that May is National Pet Month? In honor of it, for this week’s Sense and the City, out in print in today’s Ticket, I present the tale of Boomerang and the butterfly:

Boomerang is my cat, so named because when he started hanging around my house as a stray, whenever I shooed him out of my yard, bang, he’d come back again. Just like a boomerang.

Eventually, he charmed his way into my heart and home. I adopted him, moved him indoors, domesticated him (um, yes, that means I neutered him) and made peace with being considered a crazy cat lady, with not one, not two, but three rescued cats.

When he was wild, he would sit a few feet away from me as I worked in the yard pulling weeds or digging up old tree stumps. He’d roll in the grass, climb trees, hide under the fallen palm fronds and play in the leaves when I raked; it was almost like having a dog.

He’d catch turtles in the nearby pond and hunt lizards and birds. Many mornings I opened my front door to find a dead something or other he’d caught and brought home with pride as a present for the woman who was now feeding him so well he no longer needed to eat what he killed.

After adopting him, I trained him to walk on a leash so he could still enjoy the evening air, stretch his legs in the grass, sniff the air and remember his former life of freedom.

One evening, I took him on a walk along the long row of Mexican petunias bordering the sidewalk in front of my house. As we meandered along, a butterfly floated past us, flitting in and out among the bushes. No ordinary butterfly this, it was large and magnificent — dark brown with just a thin line of yellow along the edges. As I stopped to watch him, Boomer laid down on the sidewalk, enjoying the warmth it still had from the hot day.

Check out the conclusion to the story over at the Ticket website.