This week Chico and I went to visit my cousin Eva at her amazing small farm. If you are interested in food or flowers or gardening here’s lots of exciting stuff going on there, and I plan to write more about it soon. Right now, I am so excited I can hardly contain myself.

At Eva’s, Chico met a dog that he wanted to play with. That might not sound like much, but in our world it is beyond huge. They tell me that when he lived with my sister’s family, Chico was a star at doggie daycare, leading the merry chase and getting along with everyone. When Chico came to me, he was very unfriendly to other dogs and we’ve been working hard to move beyond that. He has learned to tolerate other dogs, to ignore them,  to engage in “parallel play” – he’s even learned to pay more attention to me or to agility obstacles than to other dogs, but I have not, in over two years together, ever seen him PLAY with another dog until this week. Then he met Mozzie, another rescue dog who’s the same size as Chico and just friendly enough, just playful enough, not too pushy, not too big, not too scary. As Goldilocks says in the fairytale, “This one’s JUST right.”

And here’s what it looked like: