I have no proof that the inside of the woman's house looks like this, but I have suspicions. Yesterday, the owner of the sweet cat found the note Sean left her and called us. Despite the fact that the note said she was open to giving the cat up for adoption and the food cart employees were under the impression that the cat needed to be adopted, the woman just wanted her cat back. She lives in a house with no front stairs. They were reclaimed by the earth. We insisted on meeting her face to face to give the cat back and had to creep through a hugely overgrown backyard and wait for the woman to make her way to the basement door where she refused to let us in. The door to the house at the top of the stairs was shut tight.

The sweet cat immediately dug into a dish of food the woman put out for her and argued that the cat wouldn't be 16 years old if she was being abused. Good point. I told her to get a collar for her cat so people didn't think it was stray or abandoned. She was worried that we were crazy people who just went around collecting cats. I think she was projecting.

Obsessive hoarding fascinates me. Again, who knows if this woman suffers from this, I only suspect. She keeps a job, looked and seemed normal enough, but was extremely hesitant to let us anywhere near her house. What's going on in there? What will happen to the poor sweet cat, the cat that would rather sit in the rain than go inside her owner's home? We will have to be satisfied visiting the cat under the tarp, one more resident on the street of shattered hopes and broken dreams.