Beneath the soft red glow of my kitchen light, as I make my morning coffee, I count the orchid blossoms that have finally fallen as I notice a neighbor (she lives in the apartments across the street) go outside in a long, gray wool coat.

There’s a special protectiveness of people hovering around me with the news from Minneapolis. I see fragility and hate and fear while at the same time strength and courage and compassion and numbers in protests I want to be at. It makes me even softer toward strangers.

So let’s talk about Rana. Rana is the woman in the coat.

I know her because she tries to speak to me every time our dogs meet, but Gigi won’t have it. I’m not so amazing that I love every stranger. In fact? I have an enemy. A woman with an overweight reddish-orange corgi who jump-scares the crap out of Gigi and me (and trust me, we are hard to jump-scare). But this isn’t about that lady. Let me redirect.

Rana is a nurse at a children’s hospital and you can just tell she’s the best nurse there ever could be. Her eyes truly do twinkle when you really look at her. You’re instantly relaxed. So when Gigi meets her yorkshire terrier and her miniature dachshund, even though she goes postal, Rana interjects.

“Do you mind?” she asks.

And she does some kind of magic trick on Gigi that inspires me to say, “Can I take you on all my walks when dogs are around?”

Rana laughs, and then says something that makes me feel so good. “Girl, you walk too far. I see those legs moving. Where do you go with this little sweetheart?”

Because Rana sees me too, and calls my dog a sweetheart, I have an enormous smile when I tell her, “It seems further than it is because I let her stop and sniff way too much.”

“That’s how they read the news!” Rana says definitively.

“Oh my god, yes!” I say back.

When Rana stands up to introduce herself, after successfully drugging my dog, I find myself wanting to say something I notice about her. But I fall short. My observations up until this moment were honestly… silent criticisms?

I did notice how little she walks her dogs. They seem to just stay in one spot. I also never liked when we ran into one another, but that wasn’t Rana’s fault. Gigi just goes nuts over other dogs (and small children). In my head, I’d tell myself a dramatic, theatrical story about Rana never moving so that Gigi would bark almost on purpose. This woman must hate us, I’d say. I didn’t have her on my enemy radar like corgi lady, but she was up there.

I knew it was ridiculous even as the thoughts formed, but I’m a storyteller. I cast people before I meet them. I can build a whole plot out of a passing glance and a bad first impression.

But here we are, with Gigi’s ears back, wagging her tail gently at Rana’s two dogs, whose names are Billy and Goose. Gigi takes a particular liking to Goose, the dachshund.

Rana soothes my soul as she talks about her work, about her sincere adoration for the kids and long twelve-hour shifts and how much she loves her job anyway. I part with her hoping we’ve cured Gigi of her barks, at least with Billy and Goose.

“Don’t worry if she barks so much. She’s just communicating. That’s all,” Rana says.

Gigi pulls ahead, nose down, reading the news of scattered pine needles. I know it’s better than ours.