I’ve been wanting to find a good home for my Sadie cat for a couple of years now. She’s a sweetheart who loves people, but she isn’t a big fan of other animals–neither Bishop nor other felines. Part of the problem is that when I got her, she was already declawed, so she didn’t stand much of a chance against the clawed masses that inhabited my home at that time.

Before I left Savannah, I tried to find her a new home. I even tried to find a no-kill shelter that would take her, hoping someone seeking a cat would fall in love with her that way, but the shelters were full. So Sadie moved to Washington with me (and Bishop and Gorey and Zuli), and mostly stayed in the bedroom, isolated from the other cats because they picked on her. After we returned to Colorado, she took up residence in the basement, where she was quite vocal and often unhappy. She always got along well with my nephew, however, and he liked to pet her and talk to her. My brother’s very allergic to cats and hates them anyway; my sister-in-law said otherwise she’d adopt Sadie.

I often apologized to Sadie about not being able to give her the kind of life she deserved. I felt terrible. Best case scenario, I figured, might be if I could open a used bookstore someday down the road and she could be the store cat. She’d love that: she’d greet people and rub against them and purr, and she wouldn’t have to deal with other animals except, perhaps, the occasional rodent, and that wouldn’t be a problem for her: she’s a proven mouser.

In November, she became very ill, so ill I thought she might die. Saturday night into Sunday was the worst of it, and of course taking her to a vet then would have meant the expensive emergency clinic, and I had no money for that. So I nursed her as best I could and looked all over the internet for home remedies and things I could do. For about 24 hours, I shot water down her throat from an eye-dropper because she refused to even drink. Fortunately she pulled through, but this episode underscored for me the fact that my best wasn’t really good enough, that she needed more than I’ve been able to give her.

A few weeks later, my mom told me she’d found a possible new home for Sadie! She had been talking to a woman from her church, a very sweet person who lost her husband last summer, and this woman mentioned that she was thinking about getting a cat and wanted one that was declawed. My mom immediately said, “We have one, and she needs a new home!”

In December, before we all went our respective ways over the holidays, this woman came over to meet Sadie. I think it was love at first sight; the woman cuddled her, and Sadie sat on her lap and purred. Cats are wonderful companions, I think, and Sadie’s affectionate where people are concerned: She used to greet me every day when I got home from work. She loves to snuggle, and she’s a talker, and she’s not at all shy with people; and she and this woman seemed like the perfect match.

This week, I brought Sadie to her new home. Normally she fights going into the carrier and makes her displeasure known loudly in the car. This time, she was slightly dissatisfied but mostly calm, as if she knew she was going somewhere good. At her new house–a house she gets to share with a cat-loving human and no other animals, a house where she has big picture windows through which, her new person says, she loves to watch birds–she explored with her head alert and her ears forward and her tail up. She looked more confident than I’d seen her in ages. But being me, I still had the gnawing worry that something might go wrong.

Well, this morning my mom talked to Sadie’s new person at church, and later the woman called and left me a voicemail. She says Sadie is exactly what she wanted and they’re getting along wonderfully. I’m so relieved and grateful. And I bet Sadie is too–relieved, grateful, and blissfully happy in her new home with her very own person.