
In the summer of 2014, I was working at a camp for children on the autistic spectrum in Philadelphia. I had just moved to Philadelphia one year ago with my boyfriend in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in Old City. One day, children at the camp were talking about cats they saw on the playground. The playground was small and bordered a parking lot and a busy road, so I went outside at my lunch break to see if I saw anything. I walked to the parking lot, and right under my car were two small kittens, one black and one orange. The black kitten slowly approached me, acting very protective of the much smaller orange kitten. I shared my lunch of a turkey sandwich and lured them into an old W.B. Mason box. Since I still had a few hours of work left, I brought them inside, into an unused conference room, until I could leave and bring them to a shelter. When I brought them to PAWS, they were too little to be sheltered and needed a foster home. I realized at PAWS that I would be bringing them home, and I hadn’t told my boyfriend yet that they would be staying with us. He was not happy with me for a few days, but on the third day he told me he had named them, Cosmo (orange kitten) and Mundi (black kitten). Seeing as we had no time to prepare anything for them in their new home, we used various objects around the house as toys, such as bottle caps. To this day, our cats love bottle caps more than any other toy we buy. It will forever remind me of the day we found our cats.