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How to Move to France With Your Cat

How were we going to get this elderly cat across the big ocean?

By Trudy SwensonPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 14 min read
2
One tooth left

We have a cat, an old cat. He came into my life in the arms of my son. On a visit home from grad school, Josh brought a tiny kitten, a self-possessed furball with a stubby tail. We worried about his survival, being so small, and we hustled him off to the vet to get all the necessary vaccinations and preventatives. Josh named him Willow after the central character in the movie of the same name. He was a little guy with spunk. The two of them returned to Josh’s school where Willow enjoyed his kittenhood in an old brownstone row house with a group of graduate math students.

Grad Student and Willow Kitten

A few years later he was back on the floor of my kitchen sitting with his two front paws aligned just so, a full-size cat with springy back legs, a full array of white whiskers, and soft tufts at the tips of his ears. His short but expressive tail convinced us that he was a Manx. Josh moved to Brooklyn to take on a fellowship and, after his first roommate arrangement fell through, he rented a spare room in a dance studio. No pets allowed. And so, Willow became mine.

We already had a cat. When my second and final husband moved into the household, he brought Jinx with him. She was an elderly dowager without any teeth, and she quickly established a rotating nap schedule using all our prime sunny spots. She did not want to play with Willow. We lived in the woods and kept our cats inside for fear of owls and foxes. And so, he was left to prowl through the house, hide under beds, creep through the cobwebs under the basement stairs, chase jingle balls, and occasionally swat at Jinx.

As she grew older and frail, we shepherded Jinx from one spot to another, watching her eat and protecting her from rambunctious Willow. When Jinx died after a long and dignified life, we turned to Willow, expecting him to carry on the feline culture of our home.

Josh asked us, “What will he do for leadership?” Over the years Willow managed, growing through his adolescence and young adulthood in the company of dogs. Josh married and became a dog person. Drake and Patty, Josh’s dogs, were regular visitors. Despite his much smaller size, Willow held his own with them, hissing his displeasure if they were too unpredictable and, once, cornering Patty the border collie inside the shower with a steady, baleful stare. They were smart dogs and learned proper respect for cats. Cats are sharp.

As an adult, Willow developed a cat’s understanding of the importance of napping. During this time, I began to write at home, sitting at my desk for many hours at a time, staring at a screen. Willow would often claim my reading chair or curl into the square basket where I kept copy paper. One day he jumped up onto my desk and, after exploring around, batting a few pens off the edge, and investigating my bowl of paper clips, he caught sight of me. That is the only way to describe it. His big round eyes fastened on mine and he insisted on lying down directly on my keyboard. He started purring like a motorboat. I eased him off the keyboard and gently set him down on the floor so I could get back to my writing. While I blew the cat hair off the keys and tried to refocus my attention on the words at hand, Willow slipped up onto my lap, purring and head-butting my arms and elbows. He would not be denied. It wasn’t long before I gave up and moved to the comfortable chair. Willow claimed my lap, staring at me with glazed-over eyes. That was that. We belonged to each other. I became his favorite person.

Years later. Our children were out of the nest. After decades of work, my husband decided to retire. We embraced adventure. We both love travel and especially in southwest France. Why not live there, immerse ourselves in the culture we cherish, and spend our golden years exploring, writing (in my case), and savoring the beauty, history, and romance of the Gascon countryside? We are both frugal and had saved our money for the future and here it was, our future.

I booked a small gite near the southern edge of Gascony for three weeks. My stepson, Jake, took on housesitting and Willow-sitting duties. We flew to Paris and rented a car. After our jetlag wore off, we spent our days inspecting ancient towns and villages, wandering through farmers markets, resting in sidewalk cafes, and poring over real estate possibilities. We pared down the Big Dream, moving to southwest France, to an achievable reality. On our last week we found it, an elegant old stone house in the center of a flower-filled medieval village.

We returned to the US and started making plans. One month later, Covid got in the way. Instead of reducing our American footprint and bit-by-bit shifting our life to Gascony, we expanded it. Josh, his family, and Patty and Drake moved in with us to escape the spreading menace of Covid in Brooklyn. We spent eight months together. I was in Grandma heaven. For Willow, it was stressful. He was seventeen years old that summer and slowing down. He preferred to stay upstairs out of the fray of barking dogs, crying grandchildren, and the constant clatter of family activity. We brought a stepstool upstairs to help him climb up onto our bed, his primary nap spot, and set up a heated pet bed to keep his old cat bones warm.

By autumn, Josh and family were drawn back to the city for work. By spring, the borders opened, vaccinations became widely available, and travel restrictions loosened. We returned to our French dream but revised it. Instead of a slow transition from one country to another, spending a lot of time traveling in risky environments, we were going to empty the house, put it on the market, and make one trip. It was France or bust!

And thus, began garage sales and marketplace listings, international moving research, and real estate interviews. My husband and I plowed through our collective possessions, reducing, recycling, donating, and gifting anything that wasn’t necessary for establishing a home in France. It felt crazy but good. We washed all the windows and had the septic pumped, rebuilt our backyard pizza oven, and spiffed up everything we could think of to prepare our house for sale. We spent time with friends and family. We figured out banking and changes of address and confirmed all our online bill-paying accounts.

And there was Willow. Always a talkative cat, he would meow at us in confusion as furniture was moved and rugs were rolled up. It was his habit to watch me in the early morning, seizing the opportunity to climb on my chest before I sat up and insist on a purring session as soon as I was awake. I would stroke his soft fur, rub his white chin, and massage his boney back, and he would fill my ears with loud, thudding purrs. How were we going to get this elderly cat across the big ocean? We worried that travel and the disruption of his reliable world and routine would compromise his health. He was eighteen years old and had lived most of his life inside our house.

We did the best we could. I bought him a collar, harness, and leash. The first time I put it on him he froze, waiting for it to disappear. I encouraged and cajoled him. It was time for this cat to learn some new tricks. I clipped the leash on and brought him out to the garden. The feel of grass under his pristine pink paw pads was weird. He minced along pausing every few steps to shake the dew off. The dirt in the garden was worth investigating and, yes, the illusive bird bath was finally within his reach. This wasn’t so bad. I started putting the harness on him every day. He never enjoyed it but seemed to understand that he was required to at least tolerate it.

I worried about going through JFK airport with him. At the vast airport an escaped cat, especially a cat like Willow who has led a quiet, sheltered life, would find a place to hide. JFK offered a million places for a scared cat to tuck himself out of harm’s way. Willow was going to be harnessed and leashed and, most of the time, kept in the soft travel case I bought for him.

I also found and bought a canvas “cat bag.” It is a clever invention in the shape of a square pillowcase with a zipper closing along one edge. There is a much smaller opening on the far edge with a Velcro strap to cinch around a cat’s neck. I used it to bring Willow to the vet. It was a bit of a struggle to get him in but not nearly as much as the usual fight to push him into a cat carrier. Once he realized he could sit on the car seat and watch me drive, he relaxed and enjoyed the ride.

As our travel date approached, I scoured the airline’s website for guidance and pet travel requirements. We wanted to have him in the passenger cabin with us. Together with his cat carrier, Willow weighed just under 15 pounds, far below the 20-pound limit. The soft carrier was under the airline’s size restrictions, and it was bendable enough to accommodate the irregularities found under any given seat. There was a waterproof, removeable bottom. I affixed several layers of paper towels around it and packed several baggies of dry and damp paper towels in my carry-on to take care of the inevitable. In a minimum of ten and a half hours in the air, there would be no cat litter box to relieve himself. I bought a small collapse-able water bowl that clipped onto the handle of the carrier. Finally, I packed a few meals worth of Willow’s most favored food along with a generous baggie of his usual cat litter.

Next was a pet passport. Willow was already chipped. Our veterinarian gave him a thorough check-up, clipped his nails, and pronounced him healthy for travel. He advised against any sedative or anti-anxiety medication, and we agreed. At Willow’s age it would be additionally stressful to recover from a newly introduced drug during an already five-alarm day. Exporting a pet to France would require a rabies vaccination and a health attestation. We filled out a form, wrote out a check, attached Willow’s vaccination documents and sent it off to the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in Albany, hoping the proper health certificate, Willow’s pet passport, would get back to us in time.

By now we were less than a month from departure and sweating every detail of the move. We listed our house, sold our cars, and spent all of our time handling detail after detail. Shipping our worldly goods to France introduced us to the monolith of French bureaucracy. We spent part of each day practicing French and another part of each day parsing the details of customs regulations and border controls. Form after form was scanned and emailed to our customs agent for approval. When we didn’t understand and couldn’t get a satisfactory explanation, we improvised. In a few cases we knew they wanted something, a document or proof that simply didn’t apply to us, and we resorted to simply making it up. It worked.

We spent our last few days with Josh and family in Brooklyn. All of us savored those final moments, planning to be together again hiking through vineyards, wandering ancient bastides, eating duck and sipping rosé in the golden French sunshine. Willow’s paperwork arrived just before we bid our beloved family goodbye. He was out-of-sorts by the end of our car ride to Brooklyn and unhappy to be reunited with his dog cousins, Patty and Drake. We kept him away from the action, but he was miffed. He sought refuge in Josh’s laundry room.

Josh drove us to JFK and helped us to the check-in. The Frenchman at the counter sniffed at Willow’s folder of paperwork, then bent over to examine the carrier and the wide-eyed creature staring out into the raucous terminal. After his brief assessment, flipping carelessly through health forms and inspection documents, he told us Willow’s airfare would cost $150 per flight. That is, $300 for our kitty to be squeezed unceremoniously into a dark, noisy space no larger than a breadbox for upwards of ten hours. We gladly paid up.

After a tearful goodbye to Josh at the security entrance, I hitched up my backpack and joined the long line, holding Willow’s case close to my chest. Willow’s dark eyes fixed on me through the blue mesh of the carrier. I murmured comforting kitty sounds as we approached the checkpoint. A TSA agent was shouting directions in a heavy Queens accent: “Take your laptop out of your bag and put it in a bin! Take your laptop out of your bag and put it in a bin!” When I got up to the conveyer belt, I caught the agent’s eye and pointed to the carrier, asking for guidance. Without missing a beat and keeping her volume up, she instructed me to “Take the cat out of the bag! Take the cat out of the bag!”

I slipped out of my jacket and shoes, put my backpack into a bin, then unzipped the top of the carrier. As nimbly as possible, I grabbed Willow with both hands and twisted him around quickly, so we were face to face. All four sets of claws grabbed onto me, his front paws around my neck. He buried his face into my shirt collar as we stepped into the full-body scanner. We were not going to lose each other! With great relief I stepped through to the other side, sat down with him on my lap and managed to smooth down his ruffled fur before another stern TSA agent pushed the carrier to the end of the belt.

We took it from there, finding a quiet spot to wait with Willow on the seat next to us, filling our water bottles, reading, and checking our phones before our flight boarded. It was a night flight and after the hubbub of boarding, wedging Willow below the seat in front of us, food service and, finally, lights out, a droning airplane quiet settled over the dark cabin. I was buzzed with adrenaline. I’ve never been one to drift into sleep on a long flight. And so, I leaned over to check on my kitty often, zipping the carrier open just far enough to slip a little bowl of water in and occasionally rest my hand on his back reassuringly. I wanted him to know I was still there; we were still together. There were no purrs, but there were no alarmed meows either. Willow was tucked into his meatloaf position. He endured. The changeover in Paris gave us enough time to slip him out for a few minutes and put in clean bedding.

Our flight to Toulouse was a breeze. The plane climbed to the proper altitude and shortly afterward started its descent. We stumbled through passport control. The agent gave our paperwork a cursory glance and stamped our passports with a loud flourish. Stepping through the airport exit, rubbing our eyes in the bright morning sunlight and wandering through the vast rental car parking lots, it dawned on us: France let us in! We were doing this! Willow would now be a French cat!

So it was, and so it continues. Willow was released inside our rental car as we groggily drove to our new, very old home. After exploring the car interior, climbing over suitcases and backpacks, he settled into my lap for a light snooze and purr. Once we arrived, I found an empty cardboard box left by the renovation crew and spilled my baggy of cat litter into it. Being the smart, sophisticated cat that he is, Willow knew exactly what to do.

Since then, Willow has explored all the nooks and crannies of our Maison du village. Unsurprisingly, French cat cuisine, specifically the many varieties of pâté cats are offered here, from rabbit to duck to kidney, appeals to his discerning taste buds. After a period of adjustment due to the time change, he has resumed his elaborate nap schedule, tracking large sunny spots from morning till evening. When awake he spends time surveying our cobblestoned neighborhood from the tiny balcony off our bedroom or patrolling our enclosed courtyard and garden, amazed at having the sky over his head. He’s even decided that the small cupboard under the stairs is the safest spot to be during a thunderstorm. When our furniture finally arrived from the US, he reasserted his preference for my reading chair and has resumed his habit of keeping me company while I am writing. We are together. All is right with his world.

To our delight, Willow has embraced French feline joie de vie. Often, after he polishes off his morning plate of pâté, he has a thorough wash at the bottom of our tall staircase, then lets out a loud and satisfied yowl that echoes throughout the house. We’ve started calling it Le Grand Miaou.

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About the Creator

Trudy Swenson

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