Meadow: Update Two
Meadow has been at the Farnival for almost a month, and we’ve only had one incident of severe separation anxiety, but it was pretty impressive. Last week I was away from home for a block of seven hours, which is very rare. Before I left, I individually crated our foster animals, Meadow, Bentley, and Cozette in the spare bedroom, shut the door so the rest of my pack didn’t have to hear Bentley squawking in protest, and opened the window because Cozette’s litter box stinks for hours if I don’t clean it immediately after she uses it.
When I returned home later that afternoon, Meadow was standing outside the house, under the spare bedroom’s window, panting. Her tongue hung out of her mouth like an uncoiled ribbon, and her snout pointed up at the window, as though she couldn’t figure out why getting back inside was so much harder than breaking out. She saw me and started jumping, tail swinging like I’d been gone for a year. Like she hadn’t done anything wrong, and I should be as thrilled to see her, as she was to see me.
Walking inside, I felt an enormous amount of trepidation opening the door of the spare bedroom, imagining tufts of feathers from shredded pillows or soil from toppled plants. But nothing was disturbed besides the window screen, which rested outside in the gravel flowerbed. Remarkably, her crate was still latched, but somehow, that little Houdini, managed to unhook the hinges and squirm free. Bentley, still in his crate, looked severely pissed off, like he thought she should of freed him before she jumped out the window.
As soon as I opened the porch gate for Meadow, she ran into the house, gulped a bowl of water, then fell sound asleep on the kitchen’s cold tile floor until morning.