After looking around and deciding that her owners weren't anywhere to be found, I tried to catch her. Let me tell ya, puppies have WAY too much energy! She had no interest in stopping long enough for me to check her tags, so I had to bribe her with a stick and a good ole' game of fetch. Works every time.


When I finally wrestled her to the ground and saw her tag, I saw that there was no name or number there; just the number for a humane society and an ID number. Welp, better than nothing, right? After having memorized the phone number long enough to dial it (She was REALLY hard to keep still, so I had to do it fast before she bounded off into the field again), and calling, I realized that without the ID number, this call was pointless.



So, here I was, crouching in the middle of the street, on the phone with a very patient receptionist, trying to get this hyper dog to come over to me again so I could read the ID. Grabbed another stick and voila! It worked.


Well, the girl couldn't give me any information about where to take her (very frustrating, but I get it), but she said she would call the owners and I could bring her in. I knew as soon as she called them, they would come outside looking for her, so I just waited, hoping I wouldn't have to drive across town alone with a crazy puppy in the backseat of my Altima.


Pretty soon, a mom came out of her house with a baby on her hip, calling out for Bella. Well, Bella had no desire to go home, so she made the transfer quite difficult. When we finally coaxed her to the house, she pulled away and slipped out of her collar and RAN! The poor mom, baby still on her hip, couldn't do anything about it.


So I grabbed a stick, called out for that puppy, and grabbed her. Picked her up and carried her to the house. Immediately, this sweet woman starting apologizing for the fact that her baby had thrown cheese on the floor. I said, "It's okay, don't worry about it. That's what babies do!"


I find lessons in everything. It struck me how quick we are to apologize for being human. Here was this woman, whom I'd never met before, telling me she's sorry that her baby messed up her floor.


We like to hide our messes. We tailor our Facebook albums and our Instagram feeds to portray the lives we wish we lived. And even when we spend time with people who love us no matter what, we still feel the pressure to avoid being too vulnerable. We fear judgment. We fear rejection. We fear not being good enough.


But you know what's funny about this whole story? I don't know this woman, this mother with a baby on her hip and cheese on her floor; but I felt a connection with her in a weird sort of way. It was a reminder to me that we're all human and behind our closed doors, the ones in our houses AND our hearts, there are messes we don't want anyone to know about.


Loves, we all have cheese on our floor. And that's okay.