Forlorn on the Front Lawn
Much like any other Wednesday afternoon, I was pulling into my driveway when something blue caught my eye near the curb of my lawn.
Unable to focus on much else, I headed toward what looked like a blanket or a towel immediately after parking in the driveway. As I walked toward the curb, my neighbor across the street started to meet me halfway…
"Did you see the cat?" She asked.
"The cat??" Things just got bewildering.
Sure enough, lying under a blue towel was a dead cat - just heartbreaking. There was evidence of vehicular impact on the street, but I'll spare you the details.
I had questions. Did the driver think the cat was mine? Had I hit a cat accidentally while driving, would it occur to me to sacrifice a towel to tuck it in on the nearest property? Why not leave it in the street?
So here I stood, at a loss for how to handle this unforeseen tragedy. I stepped inside and called the HOA, who advised me that since the cat was on my property, maintenance personnel would not be responsible for removing it.
"I didn't put the cat there. It's not my fault that whoever hit it decided to leave it on my property," I retorted.
In what you might call an act of good faith, I took a shovel out of the garage and used it to move the cat onto the edge of the curb and the street - a whole two feet from where I found it. I'm what some locals call a "city boy." The 17 years I spent in New York didn't sufficiently prepare me for this. Not to say that encounters with wildlife didn't happen in the burbs of Long Island post my Brooklyn days. I’m just not versed in carcass disposal. In Middle School, I was the proud owner of a cat named Cameo. He behaved more like a loyal pup than an emotionally detached feline. As I awkwardly moved the poor, rigid corpse, I remembered the solemn funeral we had for my uncle's cat Mimi, when I visited Broward County as a kid. We shared a collective cry during the backyard burial.
My second call to the HOA went more as predicted. The office agreed to send someone out for disposal this time. I stood watch from inside the garage. What happened next was remarkable to witness. An unassuming pick up truck pulled up across the street. Out came the experienced wrangler - trash bag and Nifty Nabber Picker Grabber (those pole contraptions with a hand lever and two pronged claws at the end) in hand. She gloved up, and in one fell swoop turned the bag inside out, lifted the cat by the tail and enveloped it by returning the bag to its original orientation. She hurled the bag into the truck bed, discarded her gloves and was on her way. What a pro.
What would you do if God forbid you fatally hit an animal while driving through a subdivision? Would you leave it alone? Relocate it to the nearest lawn? Wrangle it?