Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
Three named cats. Three households. One thing that has always been true.
Cordovan
Mariposa and Quincy Espinosa met in the cat aisle of the IKEA in Portland, Oregon in March of 2017.
They were both shopping for cat trees. They were both buying their first cat tree. They were both about to be adopting their first cats. Quincy, who had transitioned three years earlier, was getting a brown-tabby kitten named Cordovan from a rescue in Beaverton. Mariposa, who had transitioned in the summer of 2014, was getting a black domestic shorthair named Pepper from a foster in Hillsboro.
They ended up at the same checkout. Mariposa was four people behind Quincy. They had the same cat tree.
Cordovan and Pepper grew up together in a small apartment in the Mt. Tabor neighborhood, two cats and two women in the same eight hundred square feet, the same way most great love stories begin.
Pepper passed in November 2024, at twelve, of kidney disease.
Cordovan is nine. He sleeps on the spot where Pepper used to sleep, on the foot of the bed, between Mariposa and Quincy, every night.
Bishop
Roland Vance and Theo Vance — same last name now, different last names for the first eleven years they knew each other — have been together since they met at a dive bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2009.
They were married in 2015, divorced in 2019, and remarried in 2022.
Bishop, a black-and-white tuxedo cat with one back foot dipped in white, has lived through all of it. He moved with Roland to the studio apartment after the divorce. He moved back to the house when Theo asked Roland to come home in early 2022, on the back porch, on the third anniversary of the night they had separated, both of them crying, neither of them able to look at the cat.
Bishop is fourteen now. He has watched Roland and Theo through every version of themselves. He is the only living witness to the worst of it and the best of it. He still sleeps, when there is room, on Roland’s chest.
Theo says: “Bishop did not believe in the divorce. He was right.”
Plinth
Hattie Cordwainer, who is forty-three and lives by herself in a brick row house in the Boston-Edison neighborhood of Detroit, has tried for nine years to have a child.
She has done four cycles of IVF. The fourth one — the longest one, the most expensive one — ended in late 2022.
Plinth — a sixteen-year-old orange-marmalade tabby with one chipped front fang and a habit of climbing into laundry baskets — was the cat she adopted in 2010, the year she came out to her parents. He was, by some considerable distance, the longest relationship of her adult life.
Plinth slept against the small of her back on every night of every cycle.
He still does.
Hattie says: “I tried very hard to make a family the way I was supposed to. The family I have is, mostly, an orange cat. I think I am okay with that.”
The thing that is always true
Pride Month begins on Sunday.
It is, for a lot of people, a month of parades and rainbows and very loud joy. It is also — for the people whose families are built out of choice and against difficulty and over years of being told they could not have what they wanted — a month of looking back at who, exactly, was actually there for them through it all.
Sometimes, the answer is a person.
Sometimes, the answer is a small warm animal asleep on the bed.
Cordovan is nine. Bishop is fourteen. Plinth is sixteen.
They did not ask anybody who their humans were before they loved them.
They just decided their humans were theirs. 🐾