Biggest protest crowd yet at Cedar Rapids #nokings. I estimated 5k: some costumed, some dancing, all peaceful and there to stand up and be counted.

Happy first found day to my tortie-cat! She nearly fit inside my palm a year ago. I heard her before I saw her, lurking outside, wanting her dinner.

This is what I wrote the DNC and Iowa Democratic Party the morning after the caucus:

Go, Cory, go! He's using his platform for good, as one of the best speakers and most compassionate leaders we have.

Love is the answer. Love is a dog.

"He knew you were lonely." It sounds impossible. But every word is true. On the ninth anniversary of losing my Gonzo, six and a half years after rescuing Ludo from the next car to speed into the lane where he waited, I know what happened and suspect I know why.

My daughters had long ago decided that Gonzo deserved a birthday, even if we hadn’t been sure when it truly was. The day I found my next dog was the eighteenth anniversary of the date they’d decided on, long ago. “You were sent,” she said.

My compact car and I swung through the median and back to the dog, with an optimism that we could block oncoming traffic. I got the dog to the vet, left my name and reached my work meeting with one minute to spare.

There would never be another, I knew that. For three years, I lived with loss and guilt. Friends told me of their own once in a lifetime soul dogs, how lucky I was to have had Gonzo at all. And you learn to live with grief; it just moves inside. Until one day…

Gonzo died on a Monday in 2015, fifteen years, six months and some days after he entered this world. A part of me also died that day which has never returned. We understand these demarcation lines in retrospect, the changes after we marry, become parents, lose our own.

On walks, if my daughters and I teased him by swapping who nominally held his leash (we rarely used one), he would look back at me, at them, and then politely but determinedly army crawl back to me.

For he was love, love incarnate. Gonzo accepted and mothered all small animals: four ferrets, two parakeets, two rescued baby crows, three kittens, and one rabbit.

Acquiring a mid-sized family dog by choice was an act of love, for my husband and for my daughters, whom I did not want to grow up fearing dogs. That’s important, as you’ll see, that Gonzo came to us because of love.

He came to us in early August 2000, around ten weeks old, and so we backdated his origin story to early June. My daughters, two and five, thought he was the brother they never had and treated him as such, inviting the puppy to impromptu tea parties and dressing him in their old clothes.

He was not in fact brown. After a bath removing the farm manure in which he’d slept and played, Gonzo revealed his true colors. He was a silky black dog with yellow eyebrows, “eyes into Heaven,” as the story goes. Gonzo was the black, white and gold standard of all dogs, but I didn’t know it then.

I'll never know the exact date my best friend was born. We found him through an ad for FREE PUPPIES, back when such things were done. He was a farm mutt- probably mostly Lab but with some Spaniel thrown in or maybe Australian Shepherd. There’s a lot we didn’t know about him, even his color.