Before you can appreciate the significance for Brynne of having “Sgt. Pepper’s Catio” attached to her home, you should know that she is a prolific planner.
“I like to plan!” Brynne smiles, showing how she draws the value of a week’s meals on a spreadsheet.
“There’s nothing wrong with planning!”
Not until the plans go wrong. Like during the pandemic, when Brynne dealt with a number of things that didn’t go as planned.
First, Brynne and her husband had to cancel their plans for a 100-person church wedding and replace it with a dozen people greeting each other on the street during a car trip. Brynne then dropped out of nursing school after realizing that she was not ready for the career she had planned. There was also the rescue cat they adopted and thought of naming Iron Man’s girlfriend.
“When we picked up the cat (from the vet) we were told Pepper Potts was a gentleman,” Brynne laughs.
They called the gray cat Sgt. Pepper, on the other hand, before realizing how lonely his heart seemed to be trapped inside.
“If there’s a problem I can’t solve, I’ll think about it before I fall asleep,” Brynne says. “When I wake up, I say, ‘That’s how I’m going to do it.'”
But that was the first thing: to wake up and be able to draw detailed, fully-formed plans for an enclosed yard so that the cat could safely experience being outside.
“I think I’m very helpful,” says Brynne, pointing to how she built the “cation.”
“I get it from my mother.”
Brynne’s mother was a teacher before an unexpected renovation of Brynne’s childhood home changed her career plans and she became an architectural draftsman.
Now, thanks to Cati, followed by other more substantial projects, Brynne is following in her mother’s footsteps.
“It seemed like a full circle moment,” says Brynne, describing how when she was little she used to watch her mother work in her home office.
“Because this is the house where I grew up.”
Just wait. What?
This was another major unplanned pandemic event. Brynne and her husband had planned to stay in their apartment until more space was needed. But when Brynne saw that the house her parents used to have was available for rent, it looked like it had to be. So they made an unexpected move.
“That was her office. And now it’s mine,” Brynne smiles, showing pictures of her mother working on the computer, followed by her doing the same.
“I say she built it for me, well in advance!”
In short, although Brynne did not realize her plan to become a nurse, she did meet her husband at school. Although they did not have a big wedding, the intimacy ended up feeling even better than they had planned. Although they did not plan to move, they found a home that already felt like home. Although she had no plans to adopt a bold, masculine cat, Sgt, Pepper’s demands on being outdoors inspired Brynne to create a cat, which led to a truly successful career.
Although nothing went according to plan, Brynne says she couldn’t have planned it better.
“You can have the best intentions and the best plans,” Brynne smiles. “But sometimes there’s something even better than you could have imagined.”