Abigail Taber, 4, looks out at Miss Chatham from inside the Laundry Basket. Miss Chatham still enjoys time outdoors, but now spends her nights curled and content inside. DANA ROMANOFF/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

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Delicate Cycle Stray cat part of the fold at Stafford coin laundry

Wild cat has made her home at laundry for more than a decade

Date published: 3/5/2006

By KRISTIN DAVIS

When Marci Shaver unlocks the laundry at 7 a.m., Miss Chatham is waiting. She is warm and sleepy-eyed, a swirl of gray on a stack of rags beneath the office counter.

Shaver instinctively walks to this spot.

Miss Chatham unfurls, stretches, meows, then heads outside to do her business.

Mornings at the Laundry Basket are quiet but never lonely. Miss Chatham is back at the glass door in a flash, waiting like a little sphinx. Shaver pushes open the door for her, ushering Miss Chatham in from the big world beyond.

The big world was home to the cat for years--perhaps 10 or 12 or 15, depending on whom you ask. No one remembers exactly when she showed up at Chatham Square Shopping Center in southern Stafford County, only that she's as much a fixture as the storefronts.

In the beginning Miss Chatham prowled the parking lot and slept in a storm drain. She relied on humans only for sustenance, and they obliged with shrimp and tuna, bowls of dry cat food and bits of fries from McDonald's. She shied from offers of affection, either not wanting it or not knowing what to make of it.

There was, though, a brief encounter with humans a decade ago. Folks at a nearby dental office collected Miss Chatham, had her spayed and returned her to her stomping ground. She was wild, after all.

Then, a year ago, something changed.

Shaver had just taken over the laundry's operation. She saw the little bowls by the door and the cat who visited them.

Paula MacWelch, who has washed and dried her laundry there almost every Wednesday afternoon for nine years, filled Shaver in.

"She's the little mascot," MacWelch says. Miss Chatham's shopping center home inspired her name, but no one knows who first gave her the moniker. She had a litter of kittens maybe a decade ago, and the same people who spayed her found homes for them.

Miss Chatham, Shaver says, "came with the store. She was part of the package, whether I liked it or not."

She liked it.

On March 1 last year, a cold front blew in, dumping snow and freezing rain across the area. It had been unseasonably warm just a few days earlier, and the sudden change took a toll on Miss Chatham.

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Date published: 3/5/2006