Eddie the Cat

 I first met Eddie the cat in the summer of 2009. Eddie lived with my friend Sheila in an English village called Burnham-on-Sea. Burnham is described as a “seaside town” although strictly speaking it isn’t on the sea, it is along part of the Bristol Channel in Somerset. It's a tidal space, the water comes in and out daily and when it goes out, there's a wide expanse of beach. There is even an old Victorian style pier pavilion that sells ice creams and has an arcade. You do have to be careful of the beach at low tide, however, as it becomes very muddy and cars have been known to sink in the mud, necessitating a rescue.

Sheila had grown up close to Burnham and after she retired from her work in Reading and her husband died, she decided to return to the area. She bought a Victorian row house in a narrow street off one of the three main roads in Burnham and settled into a fairly quiet life of fixing up the house, working on genealogy and walking her two King Charles spaniels, Daisy and Muffin. Not long after she moved in, however, along came Eddie.

No one was certain just where Eddie had come from. He was just everyone’s “visitor”, leaping from backyard to backyard and cadging food from whomever took an interest in him. He was quite the handsome lad, a tuxedo cat with green eyes. 

Sheila, always very kind toward animals—she volunteered at the local wild animal rescue center—soon became Eddie’s favorite neighbor to visit. And it wasn’t long before, having ascertained that Daisy and Muffin posed no risk to him, he decided to grace them with a part-time occupancy inside the house. After scouting through the bushes along the lane at the back of Sheila’s house for most of the day, investigating the infant school across the lane, he would return to Sheila’s for the evening. He would leap onto the outside windowsill in the kitchen and meow loudly. Sheila would open the window and in he would stalk, giving her a noble nod before heading to “his” food bowl and water that Sheila kept in the den, high enough so that Muffin and Daisy wouldn’t cadge. Sheila also tried for awhile to have exotic fish, both outside and in the house; Eddie was quite interested in that! Here he is with the last survivor. Hasty note: the fish died natural deaths, Eddie played no part in their demise:

After partaking of the latest delicacy Sheila had provided for him, he would continue to the sitting room, leap up onto the couch, onto “his” blanket, and keep the rest of the family company while they watched something on telly. He would have one more night perambulation when Daisy and Muffin went out for their final sprinkles, and then return just before Sheila went upstairs to the bedroom He slept on her bed or, when there were visitors, on one of the spare beds in the guest room.

I spent quite a few weeks with Sheila, on and off, during the summer of 2009, as I toured around England and Scotland by train and hiking. Each time I returned to her house, Eddie would greet me with a bit of lift of his nose, allowing me to stroke his silky back. But at night, he and I vied for sleeping space in the spare room. Although there were two spare beds, Eddie and I both preferred the bed by the window; we became uneasy bedfellows.

I had just had a hysterectomy in the Spring of 2009 and was enduring all-at-once menopause with the concomitant night sweats. As I tossed and turned, throwing off the duvet one minute and then, not long after, pulling it back on, Eddie must have felt he was on a bucking bronco. Still, he did not give up his domain and, when it all became too much for him, he would slink to the top of the bed and curl around my head, a reminder to “Either settle down or put up with me as a crown all night.” I settled.

For the past 15 years, I’ve always looked forward to seeing Eddie as I continued to visit Sheila. We all have aged but Eddie wore his age the best. The dog family has changed, Muffin and Daisy are gone, for the past six years there has been Dixie, an indeterminate canine who Sheila adopted from Romania. Snowy, a white cat, also a stray who found a home with Sheila for several years, has come and gone. 

Somehow, I think another cat might find its way to Sheila’s door. She is such a loving and kind—and generous—person, I wouldn’t be surprised if word has gone out into the itinerant feline community around Burnham on Sea that there is a vacancy.

But today I salute Eddie, a cat among cats. I will miss you, Ed, but I am so glad to have made your acquaintance.

Eddie in his senior years; we all had spread a bit.