adoption day

After browsing petfinder for weeks, we made a date for the SPCA dog adoption fair. It was a sweltering, ninety-degree day. If ever there was a perfect example of "the anxiety of choice," this was it. There must have been almost a hundred dogs to peruse, all of them excited and overwhelmed to be out of confinement.

Armed with our list of sociability tests, we circled the cages. We chose a few dogs to meet, walked them, and asked the handlers as many questions as we could think of. With the number of dogs looking for homes, I had to wonder how much our choice really mattered. We could have taken home any of them!

We chose Tippy, a small black lab mix, named for the spot of black on the tip of her pink tongue. She was very licky and sweet, eager but not rambunctious. When we filled out the paperwork, her handlers cried.

She hopped right into the hot back seat of the car and we drove home with two-hundred dollars worth of dog supplies. Our adventures into dogland had begun.