This is a very good story.
Kate Howard, the managing editor at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, shared a surprising and sweet story about a dog she met on the street in a viral Twitter thread Monday.
Howard’s tale begins on the front porch of her new home that she moved into just a few months ago. She was “enjoying the sunshine and the rest of my day off after returning from the memorial service of a friend who died far too soon.”
While relaxing, she noticed a dog plop down on her yard.
Howard said that the dog was particularly “charming” and when her owner came over to get to her move, the dog, named Winnie, did not want to budge.
Upon hearing the dog’s name, Howard immediately remembered a puppy she had fostered last November who was also named Winnie.
“We spent 24 hours a day together. She was the cutest thing I’d ever seen,” Howard told HuffPost. “And she was really learning so quickly. … So bringing her back to be adopted, not knowing what would happen to her, was excruciating.”
In her thread, Howard added a few photos of Winnie, saying, “she was a soft wiggly baby puppy” and that she “cried for three days after she was spayed and went up for adoption.”
The story then takes a very serendipitous turn.
“I asked the woman whether she adopted Winnie with that name,” Howard wrote in another tweet. “She said yes, as she didn’t want to change her name and confuse her.”
Howard then asked the owner if she adopted Winnie last November — and, it turns out, she had.
“By then, I was practically leaping off the porch screaming. I FOSTERED THIS DOGGGGGG.”
Howard then revealed how much Winnie meant to her during their time together.
Howard also discovered that Winnie’s owner had recently lost a dog.
Howard then learned that Winnie lives only a block away from her new home and emphasized the significance of running into Winnie again on that particular day.
According to Howard, that day would have typically been a workday for her, but she took it off to go to her friend’s memorial — a person, she noted, who was a “tremendous lover of dogs.”
Her friend, Heidi Hall, a former editor at The Tennessean, had recently died of metastatic colorectal cancer at the age of 49, she told HuffPost.
“She wrote a really beautiful story about her life and death before she passed,” Howard said. “She always had dogs and had adopted a puppy named Thunder right before she learned her cancer was back and terminal.”
Howard ended her thread by saying that running into Winnie on that day was “beyond comforting” and posted an updated photo of Winnie in “all her grown-up glory.”
“I hope she warms your heart too!” Howard concluded.
Well, mission accomplished.
This post has been updated to include comments from Howard.