My daughter, Lily, was at camp when her cat went missing.

It was a “What if…” situation we had all been dreading. But it was inevitable, wasn’t it? The way that cat (an all-black, two-year-old named Raven but forever, endearingly called “the kitten”) sprinted to the porch door whenever it was opened. The way she sat in the window, mesmerized by the birds at the feeder. And, when she did manage to escape, the way she ran straight under the porch or up toward Route 97, at the back of our house.

“Have you seen the kitten,” I asked along about 6 p.m. that fateful night. It was rainy and damp and the electricity had gone out. It was getting dark. A call to the NYSEG emergency line on the old, cradle-style phone revealed that the power wasn’t expected to be back on till 11 p.m. It had been a busy day of comings and goings, and it was time to relax. But the candles we had set up for dinner began to lose their romantic allure, and in their stingy glow we realized that this time that cat was just… gone.

Of course I searched the house. I shone a flashlight into the closet where the cat likes to hang out on the bath towels. I poked the broom handle into the ragged back of our ancient sofa where the creature sleeps. She was not to be found under the beds or in the cellar.

My husband, John, took the car out to search the roads. I called her name and thought I heard a mew, but it was only the tinkle of the wind chimes on the porch. I walked down our road and asked our neighbors if they had seen a little black kitty, much-loved of my daughter. No, they shook their heads, as they sat in their darkening houses. I said some prayers.

I called and asked my son, Sam, to get a ride home from his girlfriend’s house. “When did you see her last?” I asked. No one could remember.

John went out to walk the property (acres of overgrown farmland). It started to rain harder. Sam arrived home and started searching for her too. “This is a nightmare scenario,” John said more than once, “That cat has been nothing but trouble.”

“I feel so bad,” he said. After all Lily had trusted us to keep her indoors cat inside while she was away at camp.

We met back home, soaked and defeated. Sam had impaled his hand on a thorn apple bush. The squeaking of our wet shoes sounded like a cat’s meow.

“Maybe she’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, “But how and when are we going to tell Lily that her cat is missing?” I grew up on a farm where cats were many and wild and kept to themselves. “Pet” was not a word I used for them. I knew my practical view of cats would not sooth my daughter’s loss of her beloved companion.

“They must have a protocol at camp about how to break bad news to campers,” said John.

But we can’t lay all that on those counselors to deal with,” I said.

The lights came back on early—around 9 p.m. Sam went into his room to change his wet clothes. He heard a faint mew. “Where are you, Raven,” he yelled, throwing the mattress off his bed. One by one he yanked open his dresser drawers. And there was “the kitten” in the third drawer, groggily lounging in a pile of balled-up socks.

So… I take full credit. I must have shut that cat in Sam’s sock drawer which had been left ajar. She must have been asleep in the drawer when I hastily threw some fresh laundry in there and shoved it shut.

As the song says: “We thought she was a goner, but the cat came back…” She hadn’t even been away.