A traveling feline comes back to Home, sweet home

Noreen Hyslop photo Glad to be home after nearly three years is a wandering cat named Fluffy.

"We gave her to an elderly couple in Charleston," Fisher says, "after she had a litter of kittens raised. I knew they were good people and we already had plenty of pets, so we decided to let her go."

A few days after parting with Fluffy, the Fishers received a call from the couple saying that the cat had left. They couldn't locate her anywhere near their property and called to ask the Fishers if she was in the habit of roaming.

"I told the folks that she did that sometimes, but to be patient and that she'd probably turn up. She always did."

Whether the fat feline ever turned up again at her Charleston home is not known. The Fishers never heard back from the couple and assumed all was well that ended well.

But it wasn't the end of Fluffy. Monday morning while at home on Elk Street, the Fishers heard the one time familiar distress cries of a cat who definitely wanted to come in from the cold and snow. At their back patio door, they found a healthy female cat that looked remarkably like their former feline friend, Fluffy, and brought her in from the cold.

"The cat automatically took to us," Fisher says. "She definitely knew who we were. We both commented on how much she looked like the cat we gave away almost three years ago."

The cat, Fisher says, seemed very much at home and oddly familiar with her surroundings. It was then the family called up an old digital photo they still had on their home computer and compared the markings of their old Fluffy and the newly acquired visitor.

"They were identical," says Fisher. "It didn't take long to realize that we had the same cat. She had somehow made her way back to us."

The Fishers say they have no idea where the cat has been spending her days and nights in recent years, but they're certain someone's been taking care of her.

"She looks well fed and like someone's been looking after her," Jeff Fisher says of his new "old" friend.

If Fluffy indeed covered the distance of nearly 40 miles from Charleston to Dexter, the Fisher family figures she deserves to stay, and so their former cat, or one who looks identical to her, has found a home.

"She's ours again," says her former, and present, owner.