Oops, I just kinda ruined the whole story I was going to tell.
My mom drives a bus for a living and often sees dogs running about loose during her routes. It's very frustrating for somebody who loves animals to see such things and not be able to drop what you're doing and help (she and I both have histories of pulling over to catch runaway dogs; it's almost frequent enough to be considered a hobby). One of the most distressing of these situations was a little white-and-ginger dog she saw sprinting through a then-empty corn field on a cold autumn day. It was in a distant part of town with nothing but various fields. The dog was small, frail, and skinny, but there was nothing my mom could do from her post driving an enormous death machine full of unrestrained children. She told me about it when she got home and we prayed for it.
About a month later, she saw that same dog again, sprinting through that same field.
Winter came, and toward the beginning of spring, she saw the dog again.
My mom is a sensitive woman and she was very distressed that this dog was clearly living out in the fields, on its own. The third time she saw it, it's ears were ratty from frostbite. It had made it through the winter at least.
One day later in the spring, one of my mom's coworkers was driving down a road perpendicular to our street, just yards from our house really, when a little dog darted in front of her car. It bounced off the side of her tire, but was hit hard enough for the driver of the SUV to know that she had hit a tiny body. She stopped her car to find a stunned little dog with tattered ears at the side of the road. Interestingly enough, she was right in front of the house of another of my mom's coworkers, a rehabilitator of animals (she used to do yard work with an orphaned raccoon riding on her shoulders) who saw the whole thing. She brought the dog into her house and, for whatever reason, called my mom.
The dog needed a place to stay, and apparently my mom came to mind. Sure enough, it was the white-and-ginger dog with tattered ears who had survived winter on the other side of town. Only now she was also sporting little waffly tire marks on her belly.
Kiera was fine. She had no internal injuries, no broken bones. All my mom had needed to do to catch this dog was have a coworker ram it with an SUV.
But she was incredibly timid, obviously had been mistreated by somebody before her days on the run. She found a home with my mom's friend's parents, where it would take months for her to even sit with her new daddy. One stressful day she got startled by her "mommy" dropping the plastic handle of the leash, so she bolted, noisily dragging the leash which only scared her more in a horrible perpetual motion machine of terrified dog who was also a long distance sprinter. But she was found and brought back to her new home the next day.
These events were all several years ago, and just last week she came to our house to be babysat. It worked put nicely, since it was on a day where I was working from home so I could attend a doctor's appointment. My dogs were glued to my mom like usual, so she was able to have me all to herself. Despite only having met me once many years ago, she took to me quite nicely and before the end of the day she even fell asleep curled up on my belly as I watched cartoons. Something I've always found deeply satisfying is how pretty much any dog or cat, no matter how allegedly antisocial, immediately takes a shine to me and trusts me.
Anyway, that's just a weird little story of how we obsessed over a little dog for months and were eventually able to be instrumental in finding her a home through a series of accidents. Life is funny and incidental, just proving how little point there is in doing much worrying about it. I'm not saying everything is going to work out as nicely as things did for Kiera, but maybe some other things will that you never saw coming.
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