When people say “love defies boundaries,” I’m pretty sure they mean national, geographic, or even topographical. The Chinese-Welsh couple. The girl from Seattle and the boy from Miami. The groom who climbs the mountain to claim his bride on the other side.

My experience of love is that species is as permeable a boundary as any other. I’ve been lucky enough to find interspecies sweethearts many times, from my first turtle Soozie to my boa constrictor Stripe. But my heart was never filled—or broken—so thoroughly in cross-species love as by Blanche.

Blanche got her name from A Streetcar Named Desire. You know, the character Blanche DuBois, who says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Blanche came to my hand as a ten-day-old feral kitten. When I say “came to my hand,” I mean that literally. She was so tiny her whole body fit on my palm. Her eyes hadn’t opened yet.

I had lost my longtime feline friend Kitty O’Shea just a month earlier, and wasn’t ready for another cat. Definitely not ready for an infant cat, one whose chances of survival without a mother and littermates was slim.

“Oh, no,” I told my friend John, who’d found the kitten on his farm. “I can’t do this.”

“I couldn’t just leave her. That mother cat never comes back to her kittens. She’s stressed and dumps them so she can survive.”

The harsh truth of feral life. I didn’t try to argue about it. Instead, I gave a heavy sigh, put the kitten in a nest of rags with a hot water bottle, and went out to buy feline pediatric formula and the tiniest feeding bottle I had ever seen.

At an age when my own fertility was a rapidly receding image in the rear view mirror, I became a new mom. Four-hour feedings—including in the middle of the night. My furry newborn had such strong feral genes that she fought even sustenance, and a nursing session left me with bloody scratches on the hand holding the bottle. After the feeding, came the burping, with Blanche draped over my shoulder on a flannel cloth to catch the bubbles of milk when she belched. Then, the bum washing, which I learned to do under a stream of warm water from the sink faucet. After that, the patting dry, the stowing of the by-then sleeping baby in a padded orange crate, with a corncob pillow heated gently in the microwave.

Feed. Burp. Wash. Dry. Tuck in. Sleep. Repeat.

When Blanche got old enough to walk without falling over, she explored. Tiny circles on the living room rug at first, then slightly bigger ones, always returning to my lap. She was a cute infant, but with each passing day she became more beautiful. More beautiful, in fact, than any cat I’d ever owned. (And believe me, I passed that “every life has nine cats” yardstick a couple decades ago.)

She was totally white, not a black hair on her body. Pink toe pads, nose, and inside ears. Eyes … Blanche’s eyes were sapphires, seen through ice. Large, brilliant blue, clear, knowing.

Apart from beauty, she had courage—another donation from her feral genes, or so the vet said. She was so fearless she scared the wits out of me at least once a day. One of her favorite perches was the top edge of an interior door—an inch and a half in width and six feet off the floor. For safety’s sake, since suburbia is at least as dangerous as the country, she lived indoors. But there wasn’t a square inch of my 1920s bungalow that Blanche hadn’t found a way to turn into a jungle gym.

And not just the house. Blanche loved the car. John and I had an Irish band, which periodically meant piling instruments, P.A., and ourselves in a van and heading off to festivals, workshops, ceilis, concerts, pub gigs, St. Patrick’s Day … After the gear went in, Blanche went in, too. She had a traveling crate, of course, but her favorite perch was on top of a speaker, where she could glare out the window at people in passing cars.

People. That’s where the love story becomes complicated. Blanche—who apparently thought I was her birth mother—adored me. Every day, in a dozen different ways, she said I was the center of her universe, her reason for getting off the bed in the morning and curling up peacefully at night. John, she tolerated. Most of the time.

And that was it. She let one pair of two-legs into her life and the needle of her tolerance went to Full. It wasn’t just dislike of outsiders; it was full-on, battle-ready rage. The plumber, the a/c repair tech, the census taker, the UPS person, the hapless kid selling candy bars for the high school band—in Blanche’s book, they were marked for death the instant they attempted to ring the doorbell.

It was—challenging. Over the years, I adapted more and more to Blanche’s unreasonable and unyielding hatred of strangers. She couldn’t change. I could, and I did. Over time, I got fewer visitors and had almost no friends left. Unscarred ones, anyway.

Some people—people who’ve never loved an animal that deeply and been loved that deeply in return—thought I was loopydoodle. They’re entitled to an opinion. Blanche would have given her life for me; that was her opinion. If that plumber or a/c repairman or kid with the candy bars had made the slightest hostile move in my direction, my furry warrior would’ve taken them on. A fight to the death to protect her loved one. Morituri te salutant, as the gladiators said.

Blanche had to be euthanized, due to terminal lymphoma, at age ten. At the end, she could only get around by dragging her hindquarters. She hadn’t eaten in weeks, and weighed four pounds. She was on morphine for the pain. But the blue fire of her eyes—that still glowed. And the beat of her heart, the tiny heart I’d felt against my shoulder when she fell asleep after a bottle feeding …

That heart was still there. It beat for me, as mine—after years and years—still beats for her.

A career historian, Annie R. McEwen has lived in Spain, France, the U.K., and Morocco. Her background helps her create award-winning romance set in faraway times and places. Winner of the 2022 Page Turners Award, Genre (Romance) Category, Annie also garnered both First and Second Place honors in the 2022 RTTA (Romance Through Ages Award from Romance Writers of America) and multiple Honorable Mentions and/or publication on platforms like Globe Soup, Reedsy, and others. When not in her 1920s bungalow in Florida, Annie lives, researches, and writes in Wales. Annie is represented by Blue Ridge Literary Agency. To follow her journey check out her website: https://www.anniermcewen.com/