Once Upon A Time

There was a young girl named Janine, who moved into her first house on the border of Irondequoit and the City of Rochester, not far from the public market.  Janine was always an early riser, and discovered that nearby there was a public market, where they sold all sorts of fresh vegetables and fruits.  Janine liked to go there, it saved her a lot of money compared to what she spent at the big old expensive Wegmans grocery store.

One day Janine went out early as usual because she didn’t like big crowds and discovered that there weren’t that many people there at that time, 6 am.  Still dark out, as she rounded a corner, she saw eyes illuminating from a vacant lot she had passed when her headlights shone on it.  There were cats!  Lots of them!  After getting out and investigating, she drove home like a maniac to get some plates, bowls, and food, to place for these cats, that she assumed were homeless and had no source of food.

After that, it was history.  She began feeding all the cats around the neighborhood.  Then one day she heard kittens crying inside a vacant house.  She knew the house was going to be torn down the next day after seeing this monstrous looking demolition machine parked in front of it in the driveway.  She called the police, who called animal control, who came and retrieved newborns from inside a mattress from inside a house and they in turn called a rescue group to help with the kittens as they would bottle feeding, or would be put to sleep.

From that day on, Janine knew she had to help with the cats getting pregnant and litters after litters being born.   So she reached out to rescues who showed her how to trap cats, and she was able to do this on her route each morning and bring them to a clinic down by Irondequoit Bay in a house where surgeries were being performed, legitimately, through the rescue group Habitat for Cats.  This would cost her $60 per cat, but it was worth it.  Janine saw so much suffering out there, and knew that spay and neuter were the only way to prevent it.

Janine also slowly began placing little huts around town for these cats because they had no safe place to burrow their heads at night to sleep.  She called them her ‘spots’. She knew the cats suffered enough, so she wanted to provide them some small means of comfort and safety.  But many people in these neighborhoods she was in didn’t like cats, were ‘afraid’ of them, and began to throw out her little huts.  They didn’t want her, or the cats, in their neighborhood.  But Janine was resilient.  The people came and went in these neighborhoods, but not Janine, nor the cats.  

Janine began to enlist help to clean up the garbage strewn lots and made sure at the end that every last piece of trash and debris was removed.  She spent countless hours  doing this.  These city lots were now safer.  There was so much broken glass everywhere.  Janine even kept a broom and pan in her car!  She wanted to keep these lots clean as she knew the City would be watching.

Janine did something more for the cats than just feed them.  She also began to rescue them.  She would find homes for the ones she was able to get, the ones that began to trust her.  She averaged 20 cats each year for her first few years of doing it, and then the numbers began to rise.  She knew that in the computer age, this would help her find more homes for these stray and homeless animals.  By last year – 20 years later, Janine had rescued 122 cats off the street, and this included litters and litters of kittens!

Janine was grateful that the shelters that were now housed on city vacant lots, most obscure from the public due to camouflage tarps, grass and trees, were safety for these mothers to have their kittens in safely, and for the ability to be able to rescue them. 

One quiet spring morning, Janine went to one of her ‘spots’ (19 all together) and discovered baby kittens inside these huts, and their eyes were huge and swollen, crusted shut due to severe upper respiratory ailments.  Janine caught one, then two, then three and four.  She knew there were two more, but she just couldn’t reach them.  They were burrowed inside these warm and secure huts.  She said to herself she would return the next morning to get them.  And when she did, she was finally able to get the remaining two kittens, and then looked over her shoulder to see one little kitten laying there, not moving.  She realized this little kitten had died from the ailment it suffered from.   She removed his little body and took it home to bury it. 

And then real trouble began to brew the very next morning.  Janine went out to do her normal feeding, she could count 100 cats waiting for her at all her 19 locations, and she discovered pieces of paper taped to five of her shelters.  It was the City, telling her she had five days to remove them.

(to be continued)…..