This rundown old mobile home was sitting vacant when I photographed it in 2016. It is in the Cozy Acres Trailer Park, an old and very small trailer park on the southeast corner of Sandpoint Road and Arbor Avenue in my neighborhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In 2018, a couple years after I made this photograph, a young couple moved into this trailer. They drove a $50,000 Cadillac CTS, but lived in a broken-down old trailer! In November of that year, I was out in my front yard late one night when a longhaired tabby cat with white paws walked in to my yard and began rubbing my ankles and purring loudly.

I reached down to pet him, and discovered that under his thick fur, he was skin and bones starved! I gave him some left over steak I had been saving to take to my parents' dog. After that, he began coming back every day, so I began buying cat food for him. His fur was matted, he was not gaining weight despite me feeding him a lot, he had fleas, and an eye looked infected. I took him to a veterinarian, who discovered that the cat also had tapeworms.

The doctor treated the cat for fleas, tapeworms, and his eye infection. He told me to keep the cat outside my house for a period of time to ensure all the fleas were dead. The cat kept trying to slip inside, and usually succeeded despite my best efforts to keep him out. I named him Sneaky because he was so good at sneaking in! After the waiting period was over, he moved in and quickly established himself as the ruler of the house, as cats usually do. He has grown to be a large, healthy cat.

One day, Sneaky was outside and I saw him in the trailer park sitting on the porch behind the manager's house right across the road from my house. Thinking that he might be her cat, I went and talked to her. She told me that he belonged to the people in this trailer, and that they were on drugs and didn't take care of him. She puts out food for stray cats, and he had been a regular visitor; but he would not let her pick him up (he let me do so the second time I fed him. Must have been the steak!). She told me to keep him. I did go and talk to the people in the trailer, and the guy who answered the door was stoned. A huge cloud of marijuana smoke came out when he opened the door. He acted like it was no big deal that his cat had been ill, and I doubt he remembers talking to me.

I feared that they would move someday and take Sneaky, since he still went outside a lot. The Fort Wayne Police Department erased that fear. One night in 2021, a huge swarm of police cars descended upon the trailer park around 3am. They surrounded the trailer where Sneaky's former owners lived, and I never saw those people again. Hope they enjoyed jail! I hate people who mistreat cats. The trailer has been vacant since then.

See photos of Sneaky.

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by Christopher Crawford

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