COVER STORY
Cat’s Fancy
Smitten rules the roost at McMillan Memorial Library in Overton.
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BY STELLA WIESER | swieser@panolawatchman.com PHOTOS BY LES HASSELL
t was April 2020 when he joined the library team, McMillan's branch manager Jenn Freeman said. They were closed to the public due to COVID, but were still doing curbside service and virtual story times. "I was the only one that was opening that morning, and I was in our children's' area, and there had been a really bad storm that came through the night before, and it was just this awful 'rarhrhr' noise," she said. "It sounded like a hurt adult cat. And I thought 'what is that?' So I walked around to the patio and looked out, and it was this teeny tiny little kitten at the back of the patio." Freeman waited an hour or so for the kitten's mother to show up, and then she propped the door open and set out some tuna when the mother didn't show. "I'd just sit there and talk to him," she said. "The more I talked, the less he yowled, and I noticed the phone would ring, so I'd get up and come over here and answer the phone, and I'd talk to the 6 Etcetera | Spring 2022
patron and do whatever, and he would start getting louder again, and I'd go back to the door, and I'd sit there and talk to him, and he got quiet." Eventually, the kitten came inside and took off running toward the library's young adult room. "I thought 'oh no, there's a cat in the library, what am I gonna do now?' So I finally caught him. He tried to hide in between the tops of the books and the bottom of the next shelf up, and his fat rear end got stuck, and so it was just these little back legs that were sticking out from the books," Freeman said. "So I was able to snatch him up, and he has been with us ever since." The original plan had been for somebody to adopt him. Freeman took the kitten home with her the first night and her aunt was planning to take him, but then her uncle had to have cataract surgery. "It was probably three weeks before, and at that point I was like 'no ma'am I'm sorry. He's mine now,' and the staff was like