Frida made every day a Fiesta

I’ve spent the last week yelling “Frida” more times then I can count. At this point, our neighbors must really be wondering who the hell Frida is, I mean if I hadn’t spoken to every single neighbor in a half-mile radius. Our Mexi-Cat has gone walkabout and it’s unbelievably sad for our family.

Frida was only in our lives for a year and a half but she made every day a fiesta. I’ve been a crazy cat lady most of my life, I can proudly say, and cats like Frida with giant personalities don’t come along very often.

Our friends always chided us when they would come over for a backyard BBQ and would see Frida on her harness in the back yard, happily asleep in the grass patch I planted just for her.

“Why is that cat on a lead?” So many people asked us and we always told them,

“Frida is a wild animal. She is barely domesticated”

I swear no one believed us but over a week ago now, Frida was handed the chance to escape and she made a run for the border or at least the wilderness two streets away.

What I did on my summer vacation; Kitty cat edition

I’m secretly sure that the neighbor who has all our packages, misplaced by the postal service also has our Mexi-Cat. Or she could just be having the best summer vacation ever and is enjoying the beautiful August weather and living the life, chasing squirrels, lounging in the sun at her leisure, being an outdoor  cat in the alpine mountains of Big Bear Lake California.

One thing is for sure and we want our Frida to come home soon. I swear, if our sweet striped Frida would just saunter back into our lives, I would probably not dress her up as Santa Paws again. We can say Feliz Navidad without the cute kitty cat costume.

A year and a half ago we were traveling through seaside Baja California and staying at our friend’s beach house down Rosarito way. We went to the fish market in Ensenada one day and bought fresh Mexican rock lobsters just picked from the Pacific Ocean that morning and some fresh seabass for a curry. My boyfriend had great plans to turn that seabass into a delicious fresh coconut curry, perfect for an evening overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

One whiff of Bangalore style seabass curry and Frida, the kitten cat stray was sidling up to us, purring and begging for a bite of curried fish, that little furry rapscallion. She delicately joined us for our fish dinner and then warmed our hearts with her friskiness and her friendliness. She was basically still an older kitten and our friends who owned the beach house told us just a bit of fake news about that silly Frida; That she was a stray cat they had been feeding for months and also that they had her spayed. There are a lot of awesome stray animals in impoverished countries like Mexico and India and it’s so very tempting to want to take all of them home.

Frida= Fake News

The morning after the seabass curry festival everyone in our family agreed we had to smuggle Frida across the border and back home to the United States. I have never illegally smuggled anything across the border before so we were just flying by the seat of our pants. We did attempt to get Frida a rabies vaccine at what might have been a vet clinic in the tiny one-horse town we were vacationing at in Baja but I’m honestly not sure it even was a vet? They had live chickens for sale outside and it was Good Friday when we decided to do our illegal kitty cat smuggling shenanigans so Lord knows if the chicken seller AKA veterinary clinic was even open. And also none of us knew how to say “Please vaccinate this kitty cat” In Spanish. So we decided to just throw little Frida in the truck, sit in border traffic for two hours and hope the border agents would not notice her sunning herself on the dash of the pickup. (We lucked out; They did not and Frida said bienvenidas to her new home in America.)

Two weeks later we raved at the fact that our little Frida was getting so fat being an American house cat. Well, guess what? It turned out she had actually never been spayed. Not only did we smuggle an illegal cat across the border, but we all also smuggled in her babies. That Frida had it all planned out.

That was a year and a half ago and we have spent the last year and a half trying to convince Frida she is no longer a wild animal. It was going fantastic and she was basically not feral anymore until eight days ago when she went missing. I have literally spent the last eight days combing the neighborhood, walking up to ten miles a day looking for our sweet little Frida. I am so positive she is out there living her best life, enjoying being an outdoor cat.

Our family is so bummed out our Frida is missing and sadly, I think our other two domesticated cats are kind of thrilled.

Our other cats were not so fond of Frida but I think that is because Frida spoke Spanish meow and Dahlia, the queen of the house was speaking a different language. Uncle Sy was too old to care and was very sweet to Frida until he realized she was basically still a kitten and wanted to play all the time.

So here it is early August and in a few weeks it’s going to get cold in our mountain town and I just hope and pray Frida has enough of her outdoor shenanigans and wanders back into our garden sometime soon.

Life was definitely a little more fun with Frida around whether she was racing all over the house like a wild cat, jumping on the kitchen counters like she belonged there or climbing on my lap every morning as I drank my coffee for a snuggle-wuggle.

 

Ven a casa pronto frida