How To Find Your Soulmate in the Home Depot Garden Center
By: Megan Brown
Tags: Life, Love, Family, Relationships, Pets

A few years ago, I spent two years working for my local Home Depot’s HVAC contractor as a lead generator.

If you don’t know, lead generators are those annoying salespeople in khakis and monogrammed polo shirts who approach homeowners to convince them to schedule free in-home estimates. You know — those people you try to avoid eye contact within the hardware store or in Costco hoping maybe they’ll go away. When they persist, you lie, pretending to be interested — giving them fake information so you can shop in peace.

Before I got good at remembering peoples’ faces, I would repeatedly approach our regular daily customers without realizing they were construction contractors and not homeowners.

They weren’t very patient.

Some of them got irritated with me.

Their reactions ranged from good-natured amusement to terrifying fits of rage.

One man brought his face so close to mine that I feared he would kiss me.

He said “NO” as loudly and firmly as he could, as though he were training a dog.

Only, I didn’t get a treat.

All I got was a flushed red face and two eyes full of tears.

Another man screamed at me.

When I turned to walk away, he followed me through the store.

Aisle after aisle, his shouts assured me that he’d said no yesterday, he’d said no today, and that he’d say no tomorrow too, so I’d better not ever try to speak to him again.

As an introvert and a trauma survivor, desperation alone led me down this career path ending in a “dead end” sign. I would never have chosen this job for fun or as a match for my skill set.

Even before that job, abusive relationships and bullying led me to believe many things that aren’t true. Like, for example, that people are inherently untrustworthy or that anyone you approach could hurt or reject you. While my time at Home Depot ultimately desensitized me to the terror of rejection, it still hurt.

My non-existent self-esteem, coupled with frequent demoralizing comments, made it seem to me that not only was I incapable of securing something better for myself, I was also undeserving of anything else.

What I learned is that not only was I capable — I was worthy of respect, kindness, and love.

But I didn’t learn this from any of the abusive men I encountered at Home Depot.

In part, I learned it from my soulmate — an orange and white cat named Hobbes I found in the Home Depot garden center.

I recently realized, had I not endured that awful job, I wouldn’t have Hobbes. In that way, my life would be completely different. One of the most important relationships in my life wouldn’t even exist. When I look back, it’s easy to see that my happy life as it is now could never have been possible without overcoming obstacles I perceived as insurmountable.

Hobbes — photo by author

As I took my daily walk through the garden center, I saw movement in the rolls of edging. I expected a bird or maybe even a rat.

It turned out to be a mama cat and four tiny kittens.

Hobbes looked like the emoji cat with a white triangle in the center of his forehead. I noticed him right away. The moment I saw him, I knew I had to have him.

When I saw him, I spent the next few workdays planning how I would trap him and take him home. It made the despair I felt walking the fluorescent-lit concrete aisles almost disappear — knowing he would be mine and knowing he’d be there waiting for me at the end of every day, no matter how tough it was.

Hobbes turned out to be the hardest of all of the kittens to catch. When I finally managed to get my hands on him, he threw a fit, and I had to keep him inside a taped cardboard box with holes poked in it to get him home. I listened to him yowl and hurl himself against the sides of the box the whole car ride.

The plant contractor who spent all his time in the garden center referred to Hobbes as “that funny orange one.” He had said he wanted to take him, but I already had.

Hobbes is purring in my lap, vibrating the whole couch as I write this.

If COVID ever releases us from its claws, I plan to have his dumb little face tattooed on my body (along with his brother Calvin’s).

To some, it may seem extreme, considering the average lifespan of an indoor cat is a fifth of humans’ lifespans if we’re lucky. But I don’t think so.

Our bond is unique and unbreakable.

Some days I realize that my life feels like a Hayao Miyazaki film. Hobbes waits for me to wake up each morning. My partner (hey, who said you couldn’t have more than one soulmate?) is a light sleeper, so the cats have already pestered him into feeding them by the time I wake up. That’s how I know this has nothing to do with food.

If Hobbes hears me yawn or stir, he runs in meowing and jumps clumsily onto the bed to greet me. Imagine Jerry Seinfeld’s neighbor, Kramer, busting through your door without knocking — except in feline form. That’s Hobbes.

After I leave the bed, he follows me around the house crying in his low monotone meow until he can jump on the bathroom counter and climb onto my shoulder. He reaches for me like a human toddler every morning. I indulge him and carry him around on my hip like he is one.

You might say he’s my familiar spirit.

I’m not sure if my family is eccentric or if there’s something to this, but my Mom once described seeing her dog in a dream before she got him, and likely before he was even born.

I think the same thing happened to me with Hobbes. As a child, I wanted an orange kitten as a pet, specifically an orange one, more than anything else. I even had recurring dreams about having one that looked exactly like him.

It’s almost like I precognitively willed Hobbes into existence. And it seems like he knew he wanted me, too. Our attachment seems eternal, with no beginning and no end.

Hobbes is the first pet I ever got when I moved out of my parents’ house to attempt to make my own life as an adult. After having a rough relationship with my biological family, Hobbes is an essential part of my new family — the one I chose for myself.

This whole experience reminds me of the concept of familiar spirits, especially in the way the French poet Charles Baudelaire described them in his poem “The Cat.”

“It is the familiar spirit of the place;

It judges, presides, inspires

Everything in its empire;

Is it perhaps a fairy or a god? When my eyes, drawn like a magnet

To this cat that I love,

Come meekly back again

And I look inside myself,

I see with amazement

The fire of its pale pupils,

Clear beacons, living opals,

Looking at me fixedly.”

Besides our incomparable bond, Hobbes is just an unusual, special cat.

He acts more like a dog.

He never lies on his side or his stomach with his paws curled under him like a turkey. Nine times out of ten, he opts for lying on his back with his whole belly exposed — all of his legs splayed out around him.

Hobbes — photo by author

Like most cats, he grooms himself a lot. Strangely, although white and orange fur covers the majority of his body, Hobbes has a small, pink bald spot on his lower belly. Due to his habit of overgrooming that spot, it’s bald, pink, and delightfully velvety to touch — well, for me, at least. Anyone else who tries promptly gets murdered.

When he’s not laying on his back, he sits in chairs like a human and uses the armrest to rest his right front leg as if he’s been here on Earth before in the form of a human man.

If I hold my hand above his head while he’s at ground level, he jumps as if he’s using my hand to pet himself and as though I have no choice in the matter.

Hobbes is territorial of me. He will sometimes growl at his brother to “protect” me, especially if Calvin comes near me while I have Hobbes in my lap.

Sometimes it feels as though he can sense my pain, both physical and emotional. When I’m on my period, he lays on my belly for hours. When I returned home from the hospital after a near-fatal cardiac event, he stayed by my side the whole time I was home recovering. Even if I’m feeling off mentally — racked with depression and anxiety — he seeks me out to comfort me just when I have myself convinced that I have to go it alone.

Hobbes — photo by author

Unlike most Home Depot customers and humans in general, Hobbes is incredibly patient. He never gets irritated with me. No matter how many times I forget to feed him, refill his water, or clean his litter box, he always forgives me. He gets close to my face, but he never screams, “no.” He purrs and rubs his face on mine as if to say, “yes, my dear, you survived all of that so that you could be right here with me.”

His love is unconditional.

When I was getting yelled at daily in exchange for money, something always told me I was there for a purpose. Hobbes was that purpose.

I didn’t write this as some long, drawn-out way of telling you that everything happens for a reason. That’s a phrase that well-meaning people use to make others feel better; instead, it just leaves them feeling dismissed.

Truthfully, I wrote this to remind myself and others that sometimes, the best stuff in life comes from surviving the worst. All the most important lessons and relationships in my life stemmed from the bits that felt painful and neverending. Maybe everything doesn’t happen for a reason. But every experience serves a purpose — and sometimes that purpose is building a frame of reference for your happiness. Sometimes that purpose is getting used to what it feels like being where you don’t belong. That way, when you finally find out where you do belong, you know you’re home.

Looking back on the pain and realizing what you ultimately gained can healing — like a familiar spirit purring loudly on your chest.

It’s easier now for me to look back on these times and see them as part of the process. Wasted time is a myth, no matter how it seems at first.