Last Updated on May 21, 2026 by admin
Pickle is a six-year-old dilute calico with a face that has, since approximately week eleven of her life, looked like she is unimpressed by management.
She came into my life on a Wednesday. I was assured by the foster that she was easygoing. The foster, as far as I can tell, has never met Pickle.
Pickle has opinions about furniture.
She has decided, very firmly and very early, that the new couch is wrong. I do not mean wrong in the way that a cat might fail to use a couch. She uses the couch. She uses it as a stretching surface, a backrest, a place to keep her elbows while she watches me make a sandwich. She just refuses to acknowledge it as a couch.
I bought it specifically because it had a wide cushion that, in the showroom, looked like it would be ideal for a cat. Pickle has not, in the four months since it was delivered, ever once sat on the cushion. She sits on the armrest. She sits on the back of the couch. She sits on the small ridge between the cushion and the frame.
The cushion has been audited and found wanting.
She has decided that the dining chair is correct. I do not know why. It is a standard wooden dining chair. There are six of them. She has selected one. The other five are dining chairs. The chosen one is, in her view, a throne.
She has decided that the bookshelf is correct, but only the third shelf. Not the fourth, which has a softer surface. Not the second, which has the books she does not knock off. The third. I am required, on Sundays, to walk past the third shelf and acknowledge her there. I have learned to nod, the way you nod at a senior officer in a hallway.
The expensive cat tree, which I bought her at considerable cost six months ago, has been formally rejected. She walked around it once. She sniffed the post. She sat down on the box it came in. She has been on the box approximately four hundred times. She has never once, in any verifiable observation, been on the tree.
This is, I have come to understand, not a furniture problem.
It is a Pickle problem.
The furniture has, in her view, applied for the position. She is the hiring manager. Most furniture is not getting the job.
If you have ever lived with a cat — particularly a small, opinionated, six-year-old dilute calico with a face that suggests senior management — you will recognize this. You buy the thing the magazine says cats love. The cat rejects the thing the magazine says cats love. The cat selects, for reasons known only to herself, the cardboard box, the third shelf, the one wooden chair, and the small triangle of late-afternoon sun on the third floorboard from the window.
These are not random.
These are decisions.
And on a Sunday afternoon, when Pickle is asleep in the small triangle of sun, with one paw tucked under her chin, on the floorboard she has audited and approved — I sit on the wrong couch, drink my coffee, and try, very quietly, not to apply for any positions she has not specifically advertised. 🐾