I don’t know when to give up this goal. Or when to move it down on my list. I feel guilty staring into her eyes in the photograph thinking I’ve abandoned trying to find her. I did so much but I feel like a bad person for not trying hard enough. Oh Maya, why didn’t you just get yourself found? 3 years ago

I am so sorry that Maya wasn’t there when you returned. I’m sure you were so disappointed. Will say a wee prayer for her every time I see a cat. Take care x 3 years ago

I wish I’d had more time to knock on doors, but it felt good to see where she was lost, and where she’s probably hiding out if she’s still alive. I sure wished she would be sitting there waiting for me when I showed up, but she wasn’t. 4 years ago

The nice lady sent me pictures from her cell phone. But this cat did not have Maya’s markings on her face. It was very sad. I found out that if you Google: found cat Ashland Ky, you get to this page. I hope someone finds her and does just that. If that person is you, leave a comment please! Visit http://huntingtonashland.kijiji.com/c-Pets-Lost-found-LOST-CAT-Ashland-KY-W0QQAdIdZ93888469 for my phone number. 4 years ago

that a man in a work suit (one piece… like a janitor outfit) found Maya. He wanted to keep her. Instead of the $500 reward, he wanted to pay me $1500 to keep her but I wanted her back no matter what. I still want her home. It’s been 6 months since she got lost. 4 years ago

Two weeks from now, I will be driving through the town you were lost in. It’s 5 hours away and I will be driving right through this town. Maya, if you are out there, if you can “hear” me thinking about you, get yourself FOUND between now and then. Run away from wherever you are captive. Walk right into a grocery store that posts a sign about you. Show up at the home of an Ashland Angel who is looking for you. Meow outside of a vet clinic. Do something to get noticed and stay away from busy streets. If you are still wearing your collar, let someone read the phone number on it. Come on, MAYA. Enough is enough. It’s time to come home. Please. Please? 4 years ago

The description fit but the photo did not. Someone found a cat and is feeding it at least. But it’s not MY Maya. 4 years ago

http://www.mayamaya.shutterfly.com 4 years ago

I emailed your story to the Today Show.

Other than that, I’m hitting a concrete wall up here in Oregon. 4 years ago

but that’d have to be a really bad camera for this cat to be Maya :( 4 years ago

I just emailed the shelter, along with links to pictures of Maya, and asked for more pictures of ‘Bailey’. Crossing my fingers!

*‘Bailey’s’ paws don’t appear to have white on them like Maya’s but…4 years ago

I wish there was a better picture of this girl and the location doesn’t fit, but you never know…

Maya?

*edit: Okay, it’s actually only 31 miles and cats have been known to travel long distances and I know it’s over the river, but maybe she hitched a ride with someone and then got away from them too??4 years ago

sad. 4 years ago

Last night at 1am my 19 year old cat Mittens started yowling funny. I went out into the hall and she was halfway up the staircase trying to get up another step. Her back legs had stopped working. I picked her up and brought her to my bed and she was obviously in pain. We called the vet and rushed her to the vet ER. By the time we got there she was in so much pain she was incoherent. Thrashing about, biting everything (even me), trying to use her front paws to pull herself away. She is deaf so she couldn’t hear us trying to soothe her and she was in so much pain she couldn’t be touched. The vet said her heart was in failure and that she had thrown a clot to the juncture where a blood vessel divides to the back legs. Evenually we decided that she needed lots and lots of pain medication, and she died in my arms- relaxed and at peace around 2:30am.

This morning I got a call from one of my Ashland Angels, Gina. An elderly woman who lives directly through the woods behind the Quality Inn in Ashland got a flyer with my phone number Gina’s local number. She recognized the photo as possibly the cat she has been feeding each morning and evening. She called her daughter who called the local phone number on the flyer, and then Gina called me.

I am waiting until the usual dinner feeding, sure that I’ll have angels there with a camera, a cat carrier, and yummy treats.

I’m thinking that when Mittens died she had a little chat with God and told her that her people below needed a little help today. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

I’ll keep you all posted.

Photo of Mittens (left) and Maya (right) this past summer 2008, nose to nose. 4 years ago

Prof. Wormwood could use a good cheer bombing today, so if you have any, please send them her way. I’m sure she will post later and you will see why she needs the cheers. 4 years ago

I don’t really “know” Professor Wormwood, or anyone in Kentucky for that matter. However, when Mooniebutt invited me to this goal, I did a quick read up.

I don’t know that my accepting this goal will really help, but I do know that anything that attracts attention might help bring Maya home. If I lost one of my pets I would be upset too!

So as a show of support & sympathy – here I am!!! 4 years ago

I’ve invited the 107 people that I subscribe to (excluding Anna) and then I started to invite people at random: people who like cats, people who pray, people who seem nice… still trying to figure out how to invite people from Ashland. And I’ll continue to invite people. It makes me feel like I’m doing a little something at least. 4 years ago

I would love to be able to help, but unfortunately I don’t live in the USA and can’t physically do anything. Am far away in Ireland. I will however say prayers and chant for her safe return. It is so upsetting to have a pet missing. I wish you the very best in the search for Maya. Looks like a gorgeous being. Big Hug 4 years ago

http://huntington.craigslist.org/laf/955493383.html 4 years ago

Joined some Ashland groups on Facebook – posted the link to the cause and asked if anyone has seen her. 4 years ago

Boyd County Animal Control4 years ago

Should have done this months ago but didn’t know about it.
It’s in the Ashland/Huntington Craig’s List. 4 years ago

I am a 45-year-old mother of three and I live in Charlottesville, Virginia where I am working on my Ph.D. in science education. My 22-year-old daughter, Jessica, graduated from the University of Virginia in May with a double major in psychology and art, and decided to volunteer for a year with AmeriCorps before attending graduate school. She was placed in a rural part of Colorado, to work with at-risk youth. She spent most of the summer looking for a place to live in Colorado that would accommodate her and her cat, Maya.

Jessica adopted Maya when she was a five-month-old kitten. The poor little thing had been living under a bridge. When Jessica adopted her, it was as if she became a real mother. This poor little stray kitten was terrified of people, and Jessica picked her out of the group of rescued strays because she looked like the kitten that needed the most love.
Love her, she did. Using her education in psychology, Jessica did what any new mother would do to bond with her child. She carried her everywhere, even into the bathroom, slept with her every night, and was successful at turning what was a feral cat into an extremely lovable member of our family. Most of the time, Jessica and Maya lived in their apartment across town, but they spent summers and vacations at home with me, my husband, our two other children, two other cats, and a dog.

By the end of the summer of 2008 it was time for Jessica to move to Colorado. My firstborn child, who had gone to university right across town, was actually moving across the country-driving even-and this was the first time I had to deal with the emotions of the emptying nest. My 20 year-old middle child, Andrea, drove halfway with Jessica then flew back home. After driving for six hours that first day, they stopped for the night at the Quality Inn in Ashland, Kentucky.
I keep a photo blog online. Here is my entry from August 1st, the day Jessica (on left) and Andrea got in the Subaru and headed west.
http://chrissysphotoaday.blogspot.com/2008/08/8-1-08.html

That night, I waited up late for them to call, and when they did call at 2 AM, Jessica was in hysterics; shrieking and crying from the innermost part of her gut. They were in the middle of a town they’d never been to, in the middle of the night, and beloved Maya had escaped from the defective cat carrier and run off into the night, drugged by the medication the veterinarian had given her.
Here is my entry the next day
http://chrissysphotoaday.blogspot.com/2008/08/8-2-08.html

When Maya disappeared, something spoke to me deep within my psyche. What did she represent to me? She represented Jessica for sure, newly moved away and off on her own. But it was more than that.

First I put out the sort of Amber Alert for lost pets. I paid an organization $100 to have 500 homes phoned the morning she got lost. And I placed ads on several lost pet websites and called the local animal shelter. Meanwhile, Jessica and Andrea were combing the backwoods, knocking on doors, and looking everywhere calling her name. I e-mailed a local newspaper hoping to get a simple ad place, but miraculously I got a reporter who wanted to write a story. Ken Hart became our Ashland Angel #1.
Here it is:
http://www.dailyindependent.com/local/local_story_217214149.html

Unfortunately, this lovely article did not give us the widespread attention we needed. So, I got on the website classmates.com and contacted every student I could find who attended Blazer High School. I sent them a link to a photograph of Maya asked them keep an eye out for her and tell their friends. Then I got on Facebook, and did the same-contacting everyone I could find attending the local high school. I felt so powerless while Jessica and Andrea were in the trenches getting scratched by briars and eaten by poison ivy and mosquitoes and being freaked out by crazy men they met knocking on doors. I made a flyer and e-mailed it to Jessica. She went to the library and used their computer to print it off. The nice librarian there let her make color photocopies for the price of black-and-white ones. She was our Ashland Angel #2. Next, I got an e-mail message from a young woman named Angelica who got my message on classmates.com. It just so happened that she lived across the street from the Quality Inn and was a student at the local community college. She went so far as to post our plight to the entire school listserv. Angelica was our Ashland Angel #3.

My Flickr account with Maya’s photo got almost 400 hits that day as students at Ashland Community and Technical College looked at her picture.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/96933108@N00/2724643779/
From that listserv e-mail, several women contacted me to show their concern and offer their promise to keep a watchful eye. I figured that any day, someone would spot Maya’s pink collar and Jessica’s phone would ring. That week, Dianne, Kim, and Kathy contacted me and promised to look for Maya. Ashland Angels #4,5, and 6.

That was the first week of August. Our hopes were still high, but by the end of the week Jessica tearfully moved on to her new home and job waiting for her in Colorado. When the rest of us returned from the family reunion in Milwaukee, I got busy working on my dissertation research while Jessica got busy acclimating to a new life. Months passed.

Then it got cold.

I’m a devoted member of an organization here in Charlottesville called FreeCycle. It’s an organization that allows people to give away things they no longer need, and allows other people to ask for things that they need desperately. The Charlottesville chapter is very large, and although it is not a lost pet website, one day about a month ago I saw a posting from family that needed to give away a pet because it was too cold for the pet to stay outside and the family was allergic. I started thinking about how cold it must be in Kentucky. I started thinking about Maya freezing somewhere under a bridge, or under a car, or under a trailer, wandering about hungry and thin and scared.

I decided that I had given up too soon in my search for Jessica’s cat. I contacted the Ashland FreeCycle chapter and begged the moderator to post something about Maya.

What I didn’t know was that Lester was dying of cancer. In his place, a woman named Danielle took over as moderator. Danielle, a pet lover herself, agreed to post something about Maya on the FreeCycle message board. Ashland Angel #7.

Immediately, I received a message from a young woman named Gina (Angel #8) said that she recognized Maya from the photograph, but that she hadn’t seen her for over a month. She said that a lot of stray cats inhabited her neighborhood, and that ever since it got cold, she hadn’t seen many of them anymore. She said that Maya stood out in the crowd because the other stray cats are mostly black or black and white, and Maya is a tortiseshell cat with beautiful orange and white and brown markings.

Gina said that she did not have a car, and wasn’t feeling well, and that her kids were sick, but she promised anyway to put out food and keep looking. Through series of e-mails, she reassured me that the cat food was disappearing every morning. My hope was becoming rejuvenated.

I sent all this news to Ashland Angels numbers #1 – 7 and got replies back from all of them that indicated that they still cared. Dianne, a nursing student and full-time nurse at the local hospital, offered to organize a search party. She e-mailed all 60 of the nursing students in her class, asking them to volunteer their time to look for a little lost cat. Although none of them had the time to go on a search party expedition, one did reply with the news that a cat looking just like Maya was living under her house in a crawl space. Rhonda, Ashland Angel # 9, was putting out food and blankets for this beautiful cat and the other strays that she fed.

Meanwhile, I crafted a new flyer and mailed 100 copies to Gina and Danielle to distribute. As if this wasn’t enough, Danielle offered to set up a MySpace website and message everyone she knew in town. We called it Maya’s MySpace. Here is the link:

http://www.myspace.com/profwormwood

Then I created a “Cause” on Facebook called “Find Maya and Bring her Home.” Any Facebook member can join whether they know me or not- then invite their friends.

I’m getting e-mails all throughout the day from people asking me if I’d heard anything. I’m trying to get a dissertation written and find a teaching job at a university somewhere in the country, while looking for one little cat in Ashland, Kentucky.

43Things has been my community for many many years. Hopefully someone on here knows someone who knows someone who has seen Maya…. 4 years ago

Cat found in Glasgow, KY 4 years ago

She has 5 cats and lives in Ashland. Bet she’d be willing to join the cause! 4 years ago

From The Daily Independent in Ashland, KY:

FOUND CAT- resembles Tabby, orange & red, white belly/paws. Found at Refinery off ramp on Rt. 64.(304)736-9545. 4 years ago

To place a colored ad in the newspaper- 104 dollars.
Finding Maya- priceless. 4 years ago

Maya may be living under a woman’s house about 2 miles from where she was lost. A team is going to look for her. If you have Facebook or MySpace, look for the “Cause” Find Maya and Bring her Home and join it. 4 years ago

It looks like she was sitting in a studio! 4 years ago

It’s called Find Maya and Bring her Home.
If you are a Facebook member you can search for and join this cause. 4 years ago