Last week, a Lowe’s employee named Ryan Finchum was working outside in the store’s outdoor lawn and garden section when he heard what sounded like a meow. As he looked around to find the source of the noise, he spotted a cat staring at him from behind a fence.
As Finchum walked around the store to complete his work, the cat followed him everywhere. She sat down in the middle of one of the aisles and meowed at him, demanding his attention.
Because the cat was so friendly, Finchum wondered whether she was someone’s lost pet. But it quickly became clear that no one was coming to look for her — she’d been dumped there intentionally.
“There was an abandoned, rusty animal crate over in the grass close to the road,” Makena Waldrip, Finchum’s fiancée, told The Dodo. “It had a hole in it and looked like it had been there for some time.”
Finchum called Waldrip to tell her about the cat he’d just found. At the time, Waldrip was out with her friends, but she dropped what she was doing and rushed over to come help him rescue the kitty.
“[H]e told me, ‘I have a feeling about this cat. There’s something about her. I just feel like she’s supposed to be ours,’” Waldrip said.
Finchum and Waldrip weren’t sure how the cat was going to react to being put in a car. But to the couple’s surprise, she seemed to trust them instantly.
“She went right into the carrier I brought and chirped at us the whole way home,” Waldrip said.
Waldrip and Finchum set up the kitty in a cozy area away from their other two cats. Waldrip sat on the floor with the cat, whom she decided to name Tilly, for an hour. The whole time, Tilly rubbed her head on Waldrip’s hand and curled up on her lap.
“She is genuinely such a sweetheart, and I still can’t understand why anyone would dump her like that,” Waldrip said.
It only took a few days for Tilly to become fully integrated into Waldrip and Finchum’s household. Tilly has been spending most of her time lounging around on the couch, wrapped up in warm blankets.
“She’s our couch potato; every day when I come home from work, she’s in the same spot that she was when I left eight hours earlier,” Waldrip said. “She loves to relax and be cozy, but she’s never turned down a chance to chase the laser toy.”
While Tilly is lucky to have found a loving home, Finchum and Waldrip feel like they got even luckier.
“We are so proud and happy to be her mom and dad,” Waldrip said.
