I have a cat, named Scout. My cat is an eleven-year-old, male, domestic shorthair cat. He is very sweet and his favorite person is my dad. He loves to eat and use his scratching post. He also loves sitting in any of his cat seats and beds, getting petted, and getting brushed. He’s absolutely addicted to catnip. He’ll greet us at our front door when we come home, and he’s very social, so he’s kind of dog-like. I have some great memories with him, and I’ll share some of them here.

My parents and I adopted Scout when he was one and a half years old. I was four at the time, so that makes us three to four years apart. My uncle did volunteer work at the shelter where we got him from, and my uncle told us about Scout. We call that day that we adopted him Scout So Day, to celebrate his birthday. Scout So is his nickname.

There’s also the time when, a few years later, I had no choice but to bring Scout with me to my late grandmother’s (my Dad’s Mom’s) house. He didn’t like being at her house and he meowed all night. Well, in the morning, my aunt, who’d stayed with me that night, and I went to wake my grandmother up, and we found her sitting on the edge of her bed. Scout had woken her up and was begging for food in the middle of the night, and she could only keep him on her bed for five minutes before getting him off!

A few years after that, actually during quarantine, my parents and I were watching an episode of Stranger Things, and we saw Scout right behind our TV, which is connected to wires and stands on a small shelf. Scout, being the dumb yet sweet animal that he is, thought he could make a jump from behind the TV, where he was, to the nearest bookshelf, which isn’t that far away. Being a senior cat, he can’t jump like he used to. He tried to jump onto the bookshelf, but missed. That is when he did a backflip off the shelf to land on his feet. We laughed.

Scout brings lots of love in my life. I didn’t know it when I was four years old, but I have anxiety issues which I’ve learned to manage, and he helps me with doing that. During quarantine, he’s become one of my best friends, and I tend to smother him a lot, which he hates. I sometimes compare Scout to a marshmallow, because he’s white, sweet, and fluffy, like marshmallows! He’s handsome, too. Scout is my companion, and I will always love him.