When Karen Nixon found a pair of garden gloves on the kitchen floor of her Maple Ridge home, she assumed they belonged to her mother, who lives upstairs.
So she took the gloves up the back stairs and left them on the porch for her to find.
But the gloves ended up at Nixon’s back entrance, again.
So she took them up to her mother’s suite a second time. But the next day, they were returned to her back door.
Her mother asked her why she kept putting the gloves at their door.
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Confused, Nixon washed the gloves and donated them. But then more gloves started showing up.
All of this started about a month ago, she said.
Then one day, she watched her five-year-old tabby cat Cricket jump onto her backyard fence with a glove in her mouth.
She usually finds the gloves at the top of the stairs leading to her basement suite, or lying around her back garden, or at her back door or in her kitchen.
Sometimes, she finds them in pairs. Sometimes there is just one.
Nixon has discovered, in all 14 pairs of gloves – of garden, construction and ski varieties.
Cricket was just stealing gloves, though, but also construction materials from a neighbour’s renovations.
Cricket was also leaving old construction material under some bark mulch in the front yard.
Nixon has been to all the houses in her immediate vicinity and warned them about her thieving cat.
But the gloves just keep showing up.
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“I’ve donated probably seven or eight pairs. And a bunch have gone in the garbage because they have had holes,” said Nixon, who first discovered Cricket as a kitten in the back barn of a garden nursery along Dewdney Trunk Road.
Ever since Cricket discovered how to use the dog door, Nixon can’t keep her inside.
She plans to put a bin at the edge of her front garden in the Lions Park area for neighbours to be able to retrieve their missing gloves.
Nixon also wants to put a camera on her kitty’s head just to see her in action.
cflanagan@mapleridgenews.com
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