My beautiful feisty, fiery feline, Leo, came to me on a brilliantly hot summer day in 2004, on one of the saddest days of my life. A few days beforehand, my beloved Australian Mist, Misty, came off second-best with a dog in our front yard and was critically injured. I was at work a few days later when I received the phone call I had been dreading from my mum – the vet had called to say that Misty had died during his operation from a blood clot to his brain.

I honestly didn’t know how I was going to cope without him. He had been there during all the milestones in my young life ... graduating from primary school, graduating from high school, getting my drivers licence, and my first job. We had grown up together. Now he was no longer around and so I felt confronted with a huge, gaping hole where my best mate had been.

My family persuaded me to get another cat to ease my loneliness. At first I was reluctant – it would feel disloyal to Misty. My sister Donna offered to drive me to a couple of pet shops to have a look that same afternoon. I still felt bad ... Misty’s little body was barely cold and here I was, thinking about getting another cat already. “You’ll never replace Misty,” my family assured me. “You’re just filling the hole. He would want you to be happy.”

Considering that my Misty had been a laid-back, gentle cat, I agreed that yes, to some extent he would not want me moping around too much. Being a cat, though, I was also sure that he’d only let me care for another cat on the condition that I never forgot him – and I knew that would never happen!

So my sister and I went to a pet shop in the Sydney suburb of St. Marys, and straightaway I saw him, standing up on his little hind legs so that we saw his little white belly, putting two immaculate ginger and white paws on the glass of his enclosure, eyeing us off with interest with big kitty blue eyes. Intuition told me that while I would look at the other kittens; I would ultimately take this one home with me.

I was right. The shop owner took him out of the enclosure, gave him to me, and he started licking my hand, squeaking at me in his kitten voice, and tried to climb up my shoulder to make a nest in my hair.
“Did you want to have a look at another pet shop before you decide?” my sister asked.
“No way. I’m taking this little boy home,” I answered.
It was meant to be. On the way home, as I held him in the car, he meowed repeatedly. I decided that he reminded me of a little lion who loved to roar, so I named him Leo. It was a perfect fit for him; from that day on he made it clear who was boss to all the animal and human family members in the household. He grew up to be a magnificent cat; a mixture of fiery red and pure white. The endearing part about him is that he still has his squeaky little voice!

I know for a fact that Misty approves of him. You see, three months after Leo came to live with me I woke up one night to feel a heavy weight on the bottom of my bed. Baby Leo came running up from the bottom of the bed from where he had been sleeping and cuddled up to my chest, terrified. It was then that I knew that my boy had clearly seen a gorgeous big peach coloured cat with wise green eyes just dropping in from heaven to make sure we were okay.

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