Courtney Irons & Pickles
Pickles is the light of my life. I adopted him about four years ago a few months after I finished law school. I had just moved into my own apartment for the first time, and I spent many weekends traipsing between shelters and adoption events all over the city looking for a cat.
I found Pickles at a PetSmart on the Upper East Side. I lived in Brooklyn, so the fact that I even went all the way up there means it was definitely fate. There were a lot of cats and kittens there that day, but Pickles stuck out to me immediately. He’s a big cat, and he was sitting in his cage in a bed with this funny, relaxed look on his face. He’s also a polydactyl, so he has these enormous paws with a bunch of extra toes and these silly little thumbs (we call them his oven mitts). This is all to say that he sticks out in a crowd. I thought about him all week and decided if he was still there the next weekend then I would be in an application to adopt him. Thankfully, he was.
His adoption was not a smooth process. The adoption organization was supposed to bring him over one weekend to finalize the paperwork and do an apartment check. I had everything ready for him, but about twenty minutes before they were supposed to come over, one of the workers called me. They had forgotten to check his medical records until that day and had discovered that he had a heart murmur. They didn’t know if the heart murmur was a sign of a more serious illness, and they needed to keep him for another week so that they could run some tests. I was devastated obviously. I’d only spent about twenty minutes with him in a PetSmart so far, but I’d already grown attached to him, and now I find out that he might be really sick. They called me the next week to give me the good news that his heart was fine (and still is to this day thankfully), but then they dropped another bomb. The vet had found a mass that they had to remove and biopsy, so they would be keeping him for another week. Thankfully, the mass was benign, and I finally got to bring him home.
“I like to joke that Pickles is either sleeping, eating, or engaging in destruction.”
I grew up with cats, but we had always adopted them as kittens. Pickles was somewhere between six and eight when I got him, so he was my first adult cat. It’s been really fun and rewarding to see his personality come out over the last four years. I’m his third owner, so it would be so easy for him to be distrustful or standoffish. But, he loves people. He has always been friendly, but he has become so loving and trusting. He didn’t even like to be picked up when I first adopted him, and now I carry him around everywhere. Maybe the vet and his cat sitters are humoring me, but they’re always gushing about how sweet and social he is.
Being his mother, I of course get to see more of the deviant side of him. I like to joke that Pickles is either sleeping, eating, or engaging in destruction. He loves to chew on things, and he has developed a real knack for finding exactly what he shouldn’t stick in his mouth. He uses this knowledge to gnaw on all of the plants, cords, and other dangerous or fragile items around me until I give him food or treats. He has cracked more than one phone screen just by biting it, and he wakes me up most mornings by biting my face until I wake up and feed him breakfast.
Our relationship has only grown since I started working from home during the pandemic. I think he was confused at first about why I was home all of the time, but now he definitely prefers this arrangement. Nowadays when I do go into the office, he requires a lot of attention when I get home to make up for it.
He and I have been through everything together. He’s seen me through all the stress of the first few years at my job. We’ve moved several times, including a short-lived stint in Austin, Texas where I had to cart him around town to safety when the power grid failed in 2021. He’s been there for all the love and heartbreak. I think your twenties are a weird decade for anyone, but Pickles has been such a constant source of joy and love through all of it.
Courtney Irons is an attorney living in Brooklyn. She loves ice cream, her daily walks, and telling everyone who will listen about how much she loves her daily walks.