Strange Coincidence

An old Rachmaninoff collar appeared out of nowhere this week.

As I mentioned in a post from May 14th: From time to time my neighbor will come across an old cat collar belonging to two of my three cats, Tazetta, Kia and Rachmaninoff. Over the years, they all lost a ton of these break-away safety collars, making their way through thick brush and doing God knows what else in the garden and woods. I wondered if they had a special place where they yanked them off because of the many bells I always attached to each collar in an effort to botch their success in hunting.

Whenever I find one of these old collars hanging on the front door knob, I know my neighbor has been doing yard work or walking through his woods. Since their deaths in 2003, he has found several collars belonging to Tazzie and Kia but never any of Rock's, even though he lost the most as a Man of the Forest would.

But on Monday, June 8th, exactly one week since Rachmaninoff’s death, I arrived home from work to find a very old collar on the doorknob with his name on it. An eerie feeling ran through me and I immediately went over to my neighbor’s house to ask where he had found the collar.

“Sorry, but it wasn't me,” he said.

I visited all my other neighbors and asked them, but none of them knew anything about the collar.

I tend to be more skeptical than most people, and it may just have been a strange coincidence, but I won’t discount the possibility that the sudden appearance of this old Rock collar was a sign that his spirit is near.