Let Me Tell Y’all A Story is a weekly column that’s usually not focused on sports. It’s brought to you by our partners at Chuck Owens, Alfa Insurance.

Here’s a story from the Furr family archives that’ll answer the question of how many days an animal can live in a car with no food or water.

It was a Saturday in the summer years ago when my wife Angela and I lived in our first home, along with our daughter Amelia, who’s now 17, but was a kindergartner at the time of this telling.

Angela had gone to Walmart to restock on groceries and when the last items were brought into the house, the tailgate on her SUV was left open.

Not sure how many hours it stayed open, but at some point, later in the night, the hatch was closed.

The first sign of something amiss came the next morning when we got in the vehicle for church.

The passenger seat floormat looked like it had been scratched on, and it was pulled eschew.

Angela commented on it while getting in the vehicle.

She also commented on how there was a fossilized chicken nugget in that same area.

This chicken nugget looked like it had been dropped between the seats many years prior. It first appeared to be a rock but then showed itself to be overprocessed yard bird upon further inspection.

Neither of us thought much about it, but some weird events followed over the next couple days.

One night we got a knock at our door around 3 a.m.

We didn’t know it at the time, but it was our neighbor Bill who’d knocked on our door.

Bill was a night owl, and he’d been walking down the street when he saw the hazard lights going off on my wife’s vehicle.

Getting woken up by a knock at that hour is always jarring.

Bill didn’t stick around, he just knocked and left.

I got out of bed and confusedly saw the reflection of the hazard lights blinking off the shades of our living room.

The hazards were turned off and we didn’t know that Bill had been the one who knocked until a few days later, when all the pieces of this story started to fall into place.

The chicken nugget eater, the carpet scratcher, the hazard light tuner-oner was revealed on Wednesday morning as my wife drove to work.

Angela heard a noise coming from the car seat that sat over her shoulder in the back seat.

Like a mew, but she knew it wasn’t a child, as ours was at home with a babysitter.

Right around the lake that one crosses halfway between Brookhaven and Wesson, Ang turned around to see a black cat, sitting in the car-seat, letting out a soft meow.

She screamed.

A cat isn’t a scary animal, but a cat in your car when you aren’t expecting it will make one holler.

I was actually not far behind her in a separate vehicle and had no idea of what type of shenanigans were going down up ahead of me on Highway 51.

As I pulled onto campus at Copiah-Lincoln Community College, I looked to my right and saw Angela’s car parked, with all the doors open.

She stood a good distance back from the vehicle as her boss at the time, David, approached an open back door with a t-ball bat that had come from the back of the vehicle.

David poked the bat towards a seat, one that the cat had dove under to avoid Angela’s earlier screams.

As I’m riding past, I see David spook the cat, which shot out like a rocket. Once its paws hit the ground, the feline freeloader was gone in a flash racing towards the tree line near the railroad tracks.

Turning my vehicle back around, I got the story from Angela about the cat getting her attention, how she screamed, and how she’d asked for help from David as soon as she hit the parking lot.

Angela was in a state of shock.

Like detectives, we pieced together the events of the prior few days and realized that it was a very thirsty cat that came flying out of her car.

It had slipped in at some point on Saturday and stayed mostly hidden until revealing itself on Angela’s ride to work on Wednesday.  

It’s been told and retold over the years, the tale of the stowaway cat, and it’s not the only one I have about Ang and an animal in her car.

Let me tell you a story about the snake on her steering wheel, but I’ll save that one for another time.

If the cat story were a movie, it would contain the following post-credit scene.

Fast forward approximately a month. Angela and David are at Porches for lunch in Wesson.

A black cat tries to run in an open door. They see the cat and give each other a knowing look.

Miss Cele McSweyn, the southern belle that operated the front of the house at Porches tell them the cat had shown up around four weeks ago.

David and Angela are now sure it’s the same cat.

And soon after it showed up, it had kittens, added Miss Cele.

Thank God this is a story about a cat in a car and not one about kittens too.