Echo
Echo was charming. This word alone best describes her. She lived a life of pleasure, demanding little and giving love freely. Echo lived eight and one half years, dying swiftly from leukemia on November 22, 1999 just past noon on a beautiful autumn day. Her time with us was too short, but we were always grateful to have taken her in, as a six months old pregnant stray, and given her a loving home. Just looking at her beautiful “paint job”, as I liked to call her tortoiseshell coat, made me happy. Echo was tiny, just 7 1/2 pounds, and a terrific mouser. She was the model for the great tortoiseshell mouser “Browny” in The Circle of Ceridwen.
Hi, Octavia! Over the past few months I have gone on a deep dive into the Circle of Ceridwen saga. As of now I am finishing up Two Dragons, and I’m ecstatic to hear about another book being released this fall!
My partner and I recently lost our tortoiseshell cat Jessa (short for Jezebel), she also only lived around 8 years. She rapidly and unexpectedly became sick with large cell lymphoma. It seemed to be crazy timing that the cat “Browny” in your series appeared around the time that we found out she was terminally ill. It almost seemed like a sign of sorts. Not sure what that sign would mean.
Anyway, it brought me some comfort during a hard time, to read about the love that the characters had for this little mousing cat named Browny as we were in the middle of a losing battle for our own. Now it is even more sweet to learn that Browny was inspired by your own tortoiseshell baby girl.
We had a cat named Dre who looked like your Echo; she would play Fetch with milk bottle rings. Alas we lost her several years ago, when she went out one night and didn’t come back…possibly chased by a fox or coyote and too fat to get up a tree in time.
Echo looks like she was a beautiful cat. after our children begged heartily, our family did adopt a stray that my son named Butterscotch. She used to eat pigeons leaving only the feet and head or beak as evidence of her meal. We did have a problem with pigeons roosting on our house until she became a resident. There is evidence in the loft of our barn that a former owner may have kept homing pigeons. It may be the reason she selected our home to live at. About a month after moving in she had a litter of kittens. When the kittens were just able to wander out of their cardboard box cave and find the litter box, Butterscotch left us. She went out and didn’t come home. About a week later we found out that she had moved two houses away to live with a German Shepard. Apparently she would rather chase and be chased by a dog all day and sleep next to him at night than put up with a bunch of frisky kittens. We kept three of the kittens, one for each of our boys. We did learn through the years just how wonderful cats really are as pets.