Tales of a superhero kitty (raccoon) rescuer

Yesterday as Little Berry and I were heading out the door with the dog to take an early afternoon run, I saw a small shadow move under the door of our neighbor’s apartment. I *felt* something-someone? There, and at the same time I hadn’t seen our neighbor come home nor did I hear footsteps as I was listening. I made a big noisy show of locking the apartment (alright Little berry! I’ve got the keys here and let me lock the deadbolt so we can go!!) up tightly in case it was an intruder and then I took off, because I’m chicken brave like that.

As soon as I started jogging though, I realized it was just their cat. I’ve noticed kitty litter boxes stacked outside their door with their recycling a few weeks now and it made purrfect sense. I think she adopted a cat around Christmas. So in the end my fear of the axe bearing intruder was pretty far off.
But the whole thing reminded me of this time when I was a kid, probably about ten, when I thought I saw a cat in a tree on our property one early evening and set out to ‘rescue’ the thing. I grabbed a length of nylon rope and my pet hero rescuer face, and started up the tree. I was a great tree climber, but, come on, it was a big tree, and I wasn’t really as brave as I looked; so by about the time I realized It was a BLOODY RACCOON not a cat, I also realized I was BLOODY STUCK.

Of course, I was not only freaking out about it being a RACCOON I was also now panicking because I was stuck, and too proud to call for help because, let’s face it, that would be quite embarrassing. So I tried to tie the rope off on a branch so I could lower myself down, fashionably at least, but mostly I just used the rope to wave violently at the poor, shivering raccoon and warn it that I was not only ten, but I had fierce extendable wavy rope! So don’t jump on my please, BLOODY RACCOON.
Mostly I just fell out of the tree. There was very little lowering of myself down and pretty much zero fashionable about it, but at the end of the day there was no BLOODY RACCOON attacking me and so I was pretty pleased with my determination to live dangerously and bonus, I got to wear my pet hero rescuer face for an hour. Of course another bonus was a dozen bruises and not being able to ride my bike for a week.

My mom (hi mom!) asked for months why there was rope tied in that tree, but everyone denied having anything to do with it. We never did figure that mystery out :)