Who doesn’t, on a cold Tacoma day, want to say, screw it, I’m moving to Hawaii. Cats might, too, if they could figure out how to buy an airline ticket.
One Tacoma cat has almost done that.
A black and white house cat moved into W.W. Seymour Conservatory on Monday and staff there aren’t sure how to get it out.
Or even if they want to.
The Victorian greenhouse at Wright Park was closed Monday, but the doors were left open for a few minutes while new poinsettias were delivered. Metro Parks Tacoma grew 2,600 of the plants this year, according to horticultural specialist Joseph Gabbamonte.
Monday is also when Gabbamonte first noticed something amiss in the otherwise quiet conservatory,
“I was watering in the dome area and it startled me at first, because we were closed,” he said of a sudden movement of foliage. “I just thought, oh, someone’s in here and then I saw the cat actually run by. And then it took me a good hour and a half to find it.”
The cat was clearly not into making human friends and still isn’t. Most visitors didn’t even see it on Thursday, the first day the 1908 greenhouse was opened since Sunday. Gabbamonte thinks the feline is getting a little less nervous around people but it still spends most of its day watching visitors from behind tropical leaves.