On Tuesday, I wrote this post, which detailed my oldest cat being missing since Sunday morning and me deciding she was dead….for various reasons.

Because Pixel rarely wanders from our property (she is an indoor/outdoor cat), and had been sick before this happened (catching it from the other two cats), I truly felt she had gone off somewhere to die.

To get to the point, she did not die but instead showed up on our porch this morning, sitting there like nothing had happened at all.

I promise I am not becoming a cat blog -not that those are bad because I like them, but I probably won’t write much about my cats again after this. Still, I felt I owed an update to readers who had been following the saga of my cats that started with the youngest getting sprayed, developing an eye infection (which turned out to be a virus, I guess), the middle cat getting sick and having a 104 degree fever, and then the third coming down with it last week.

When you live in a rural area, it’s not unusual for cats to wander off for a couple of days and show back up but in this case, Pixel has never wandered off for a long period of time. She might be gone part of a day, but even then she’s usually lounging somewhere near our house. She’s a bit afraid of loud noises — lawn mowers, hammering going as the neighbors renovate, that type of thing, so she will run back toward the house when anything like that is going on.

Our other cat, Scout, has wandered off overnight, one time in below freezing temps. Each time she’d show back up and we figured she found someone to take her in, like our elderly neighbor who has a cat door and is hard of hearing so it’s hard to get an answer from him if the cats are in there or not.

My Dad’s cat has wandered off into the woods for over a week and then returned as well, but he’s a semi-feral cat.

On Sunday, when my husband discovered the cat, he thought was getting better but too weak to go far was not under the bush she’d been under before, he asked our neighbor if she’d wandered in to his enclosed porch to get out of the rain, but our neighbor said he hadn’t seen her.

None of the neighbors had and we couldn’t find her hiding anywhere. I thoroughly convinced myself she’d wandered off to die because that’s what two of my childhood cats did (though I was older when they did.). This was heartbreaking to me and I cried every day for three days, imagining how cold and scared she’d been to crawl off somewhere to die alone. I kept trying to figure out where else to look for her and saying to myself how I didn’t understand why she’d wandered off. I was going to be taking her to the vet and felt she’d recover. My OCD kicked and I started checking the ring cameras every couple of hours, night and day.

In the back of my mind, I thought how stupid I would feel if she showed up in a few days or a week, but there was no way that was going to happen. Not with this cat.

So, imagine my surprise when I looked on the ring camera this morning to check another notification and saw her sitting in loaf position on our back porch.

I honestly didn’t believe it and just kept thinking how weird it was that our youngest cat (also black) looked so fat today.

I was half asleep, upstairs in bed still, and kept zooming in on the image. Then I turned on the mic and made this whispering sound I make to get her to come to me and she turned her head to look for me.

I still wasn’t convinced it was her. See, I’d just woke up from a weird dream where I was petting a cat in our house but wasn’t paying attention to what cat it was because I was talking to my daughter and suddenly realized the cat was Pixel.

I said to Little Miss (in the dream), “Oh my gosh..do you see who this is? She’s been here the whole time.”

I didn’t even remember that dream until I let Pixel in the house…she took her good ole time walking in too.

She’s still sick from what we can tell, but better than she was.

It took Scout a full two weeks to feel and act better. Last night she returned to jumping up on my chest to be held while I sit with Little Miss while she takes a shower (she doesn’t actually need me in there but likes to chat during her shower). Today she cuddled me again. Saturday night she came in from a brief trip outside and ran straight to me and climbed on my lap, which she doesn’t usually do right away when she comes in from outside.

So, there we are, the story of my missing cat who came home. What a crazy story.

What is also crazy is that this is the third story of a missing cat who came home that I’ve heard in two days.

It may sound very weird for me to say this, but I feel like our house is complete again with her home.

I’m so happy but still in total shock about it all, like I’ll wake up and the dream was actually her coming home and instead she’s still lost.

Oh, and she’s going to be an inside cat for at least the next month. I’m not going through that again.