Five black and white kittens will never grasp how hard a host of people worked to rescue them from the whizzing, dangerous traffic of Lewisville-Clemmons Road.
They now reside peacefully in Davie County, all of them and their mother adopted into a new home far from their precarious start in life.
The mother cat, probably tossed out as unwanted, gave birth behind Interstate Shell at I-40. Employees at the station realized a cat had a litter behind the station and put out food for her.
For reasons known only to the cat, she moved them across Lewisville-Clemmons Road into the high grass but awfully close to the zoom, zoom traffic. One person after another noticed and determined to do something to help. Soon, a small army was organized to rescue those kittens.
One was Clemmons Elementary reading teacher Diane Shelton of Winston-Salem. The group Forgotten Felines of Forsyth and Fallen Angels of Greensboro joined in the effort, putting out traps and a wildlife camera to monitor the kittens.
In total, six groups of people and agencies and the Shell station staff went to work to rescue the tiny kittens and their mother.
Shelton said she knows what motorists were thinking when they saw her dressed in old clothes wandering about the curbs and about the thicket beside Lewisville-Clemmons Road in the early hours.
“A lot of people thought I was a homeless person,” she laughed. “I look bad in the morning.”
The trapping process took patience — a 13-day process.  The mother cat came to the feeding station and into view of the wildlife camera.
“I could tell she was not feral when she came to the feeding station,” Shelton said.
Eventually, they trapped the wary mother and her skittish kittens, but there was an immediate concern: Who would adopt black kittens with white socks?
As Shelton put it, their colorings were “the kind most people don’t want.”
Enter Brian and Janice Myers of Mocksville. They took them — all of them — and are now raising them far from the hustle-bustle, heavy traffic of Lewisville-Clemmons Road.
“They are now in a loving home,” Shelton said. The mother cat quickly adjusted to life in Davie County …