I thought it would be fun to do a “meet the breeder” message and Wow, where to start. I guess at the beginning is the common answer.

My name is Micayla Ash. I live in and love West Virginia with my hubby. We are homebodies and spend a lot of our time caring for our now toddler baby grand. We have a couple of acres to call our own and have three elder dog buddies. Sadie is a lab mix and then we have Duncan and Bailey, the mini dachshunds. A coop of chickens, gardens and of course, our menagerie of Ragdolls. Suffice it to say I’m not putting my address out on the interwebs but I am about 40 minutes south of Morgantown (WVU, go Eers!) or if you prefer, I’m about 2.5 hours northeast of Marshall (go Herd!) 🙂

I’ve been an animal nut since I could pet a kitten… or a cow. A favorite memory and embarrassing story of my moms from when I was about four years old goes something like this…We were driving down the very road I live on now and the air was scented with cow manure and hay (still is) and I apparently took a deep, dramatic breath and said “that smells soooo good!” I’ve been a country girl forever! I moved on from there to being a teen horse fanatic and yes, I had my own little gelding and later my own barn full of horses. Gorgeous Appaloosas…and that’s truly where the story begins. You see my passion is in being a line chaser. Genetics, pedigrees, I love chasing the history. As my family grew I had to back off being a horse breeder and became interested in a new, and much smaller project.

I had at some point picked up a Cats magazine and discovered I was attracted to two breeds. The Manx and the Ragdoll Cat. The Ragdoll was fairly new and just starting to make its name heard in publications. I started reading everything I could find (umm telling my age, there was no internet at my house back then) and I started calling the few breeders listed in those same Cats and Cat Fancy magazines. I learned the Manx has a few very inherent issues I would never want to deal with, especially with a small child in the house and the more I looked at those Ragdolls, the harder I fell.

From my scrapbook

I didn’t begin this adventure alone. Cynthia Roberts, a good friend who was also interested in the breed and I planned together, and together we created Emberhearth Cattery. In 1997 we jointly adopted four Ragdolls from Attique Cats in NJ and Classicat Ragdolls in PA. KC was our main papa kitty and the girls were Sierra, Nikita and Duchess. I’d give my right arm to have some of those pedigrees again…and, I’ve managed to track down and acquire a few relatives but that’s another story…

Country Girl (n) – Just a girl with dirt on her jeans, a song in her heart and a cat in her lap ~ Me