Saying Goodbye to Penny

On Wednesday, November 12, 2025, the United States minted its last penny—and my Penny took her last breath.

Penny, in her foster home before I adopted her. The rescue called her “Miss Punctuation.”

I never planned to adopt a chihuahua. I went to the rescue event to ask about a poodle. I’d had poodles and poodle mixes my whole life. I wanted Duncan to have a companion, and the rescue had a female mini poodle that I thought would be perfect. My place in line was next to a pen with one of their adoptable dogs: a tan chihuahua mix named “Miss Punctuation.” As I stood there, Miss Punctuation came over and nudged my hand with her head so I’d pet her. The rescue person noticed and said, “She’s never like that with anyone.” I shrugged off the comment. After all, I wanted a poodle, not a chihuahua.

The poodle girl did a home visit, and Duncan soundly rejected her. Only then did I think about the rescue person’s comment. I went to the rescue’s next event and this time, hung out with Miss Punctuation. At one point, I held her. While in my arms, she snapped at anyone else who tried to pet her. She wanted everyone to know that I was her person.

She came for a home visit. She walked in, peed on all four corners of my living room rug, jumped up on the sofa, and declared herself at home. Duncan ignored her. A week later, she officially became mine. I renamed her Penny.

Penny taught Duncan how to beg.

Penny and Duncan had an odd relationship. They moved in separate orbits at home, but clung to each other at day care and in boarding. She tried to engage him in play; he had no interest. Still, she helped draw him out of his shell and taught him how to dog.

When Duncan died last year, Penny took it on herself to console me. She stayed close to me, engaged with me, led me on walks along new paths. She also reveled in finally being an only dog.

She was not happy when I brought home Ozzie. She made it clear that this was her house, but eventually, we reached a point of reluctant tolerance.

Penny had OPINIONS, and she was not shy about sharing them.

Through it all, Penny had a larger than life personality. She was the most expressive dog I’ve ever known. Duncan was a dog who took up no space. Penny, on the other hand, filled every nook and cranny. I used to describe her as being “bigger on the inside,” as eight hundred pounds of sass in an eight pound body. There was never any question about how she felt. She made sure you knew.

She loved walks and claimed every yard in our subdivision. She had a preferred routine for checking and refreshing her marks, too. And God help any other dog that dared exist in her territory. Same for the local wildlife. She chased every squirrel she encountered. She even tried to start something with two Canada geese in our front yard. It took years, but I finally trained her to accept that other dogs did, in fact, have a right to walk on the same streets she did and to exist in their own homes—even her sworn enemies, the weimaraners down the street. I was not as successful with the wildlife.

Penny hated cold weather—cold meaning anything below 70°F—and over her short life, she accumulated an impressive collection of sweaters, sweatshirts, and jackets. She burrowed under blankets, even when it was 85°F and humid outside. She toasted in sun spots. (She was a chihuahua, and everyone knows chihuahuas are solar powered.) She was a heat-seeking missile, and her favorite place to warm up was my lap.

Penny’s favorite place was on or next to me.

She was terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks. Any loud boom noises, actually. She once had a meltdown because my neighbor slammed their car door shut. Her fear got worse as she got older. Enter a Happy Hoodie and a Thundershirt. Eventually, that wasn’t enough. A couple of years ago, when she started trying to bark the thunder and fireworks away, I brought her to the vet and said, “Either she gets medicated or I do.” (She did.)

I called her “Miss Penny,” “Baby,” and “MA’AM,” and I thought she’d be with me into my own old age. After all, chihuahuas are long-lived dogs—often living into their late teens and sometimes twenties. When I adopted Penny, she was a year, maybe year-and-a-half, old. I figured we’d have close to two decades together.

Life had other plans.

On Wednesday night, Penny had a seizure. It came out of nowhere, and it was terrifying—for both of us. Then she had another one. I rushed her to the emergency vet. She had a third seizure as the vet examined her. He listened to her heart and said, “She’s dying.”

I was not prepared for those words. Penny had seen her regular vet a month before. There was no indication then that anything was wrong with her.

Penny (2016–2025)

The emergency vet managed to stabilize her, so we could talk about her situation. It was heartbreakingly clear that there was only one option: saying goodbye.

I cried. I pet her. I told her I loved her. I told her I would keep my promise to take care of her and make her all better, just not the way I had expected. She leaned over and touched her nose to mine. I’d like to think she was saying, “Thank you.”

Minutes later, it was over. A few hours after her first seizure, she was gone.

It’s going to take me a while to grapple with what happened and with the giant hole that small dog left in my life.

I hope that someday she’ll find her way back to me.

If you would like to do something to honor Penny, please make a donation to Young at Heart Senior Pet Adoptions or another rescue near you.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Day Leap Soared by Blair Braverman

I have been in a reading slump the last few months. I started three books and did not finish them—not because of the books but because my brain could not focus. But last week, I read a book that brightened my day and my mood. It’s a picture book by Blair Braverman called The Day Leap Soared.

I’ve been a fan of Braverman’s for a while. I’ve read her memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, about her time a Norwegian folk school, and her book Dogs on the Trail, about life with her sled dogs in northern Wisconsin. This is her first picture book, and it is delightful.

The story focuses on one of Braverman’s sled dog puppies, Leap, and features other members of her team. Puppy Leap looks at the grown-up dogs around her and notices their special talents and wonders what her special talent will be. It’s an adorable story about finding yourself.

Olivia When’s illustrations are cute as heck and whimsical and capture each dog’s unique personality. (I loved When’s art so much that I bought some postcards from her shop.)

On the whole, Braverman’s book looks beautiful and shares a beautiful message about being true to yourself. It’s worth checking out.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The best book I read this month was a hard but powerful read. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch imagines an Ireland plunging into authoritarianism. We watch this descent through the lens of a single family’s experience.

The Stack family are an ordinary middle-class family living in Dublin. Larry is a teacher and union representative. Eilish is a scientist in a biomedical firm. They have four children: teenagers Mark, Molly, and Bailey and infant Ben. Eilish is also caring for her dementia-ridden father, who lives on the other side of town.

The story opens with a late-night visit from the police, who are looking for Larry. Things get worse from there. As the country’s authoritarian leaders clamp down, life in Dublin becomes more difficult—food grows scarce, travel is limited. The country becomes torn by civil war. Eilish struggles to keep her family together as the danger escalates.

It’s a dark story and one that does not offer much, if any, hope. Like other dystopian stories, it’s inspired by things that have happened (in this case, the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis) and a warning of what could be. Living here in the United States, it all hit just a little too close for comfort. Still, it is a worthwhile read, a reminder of the human cost of an authoritarian power grab and of the humanity that exists and persists under authoritarian rule.

The Best Book I Read This Month: 1984 by George Orwell

The best book I read this month is a classic: George Orwell’s 1984. I’d read the book in school many decades ago. Given current events—and my discovery of Sandra Newman’s retelling (I can never resist a retelling!)—it felt like a good time to revisit it.

Whoo boy! It held up. It was stark and powerful. If anything, it resonated more with me now than it did in my student days. (I was always more of a Brave New World girl.) Orwell’s story and his prose lit up my brain like a pinball machine, so much so that, for the first time in my life, I kept a reading journal.

The similarities between the Party rule in 1984 and what’s happening in the United States right now were glaringly obvious to me: the cult of personality; the surveillance state; the insistence on blind obedience; the manipulation of information; the presentation of lies as truth; the use of threats, intimidation, and violence to force compliance; and the creation of a wealthy, insider elite and a poor “outsider” populace. It’s like the current administration and its adherents are using Orwell’s book not as the warning it was intended to be but rather as a how-to guide.

The three maxims of the Party—War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength—nicely sum up the current administration’s policies. The slogans are not all that different from the administration’s use of “Peace through Strength”*** to describe its bombing of Iran, not to mention the ways that the administration’s education and economic policies promote ignorance and wage slavery.

There are differences, of course. In the United States, race and religion play a far bigger role than they do in Orwell’s vision, where the divisions are primarily class divisions. What we are seeing here is the creation of a Christian nationalist elite (with all the white supremacy that goes with it) alongside an oligarchy of (white male) billionaires. Orwell’s world is very much shaped by Soviet totalitarianism (as seen, for example, in Party members’ use of comrade for each other), and I see what’s happening here in the United States as more closely resembling Nazi totalitarianism. But push comes to shove, totalitarianism is totalitarianism, and 1984 is chilling vision of where we could be headed.

***The slogan dates back farther than this administration. It has been part of the Republican platform since 1980 and can be traced back even farther than that. (I’m looking at you, Barry Goldwater.)

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

This month, I escaped real-life horrors by reading a horror story set in Sweden. Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village centers on a small mining town in Sweden whose population disappears without explanation.

The story is told in dual timelines. In one timeline, a young woman in the present leads a documentary team into the abandoned village for an investigation. In the other, the young woman’s great-grandmother narrates the events that lead to the disappearance. At times, this structure added to the tension. At times, it gave away information. In reflection, I think I would have preferred the story told in a single timeline (the modern one) and the characters work harder to get the information that the reader needs.

There were some holes in the story, too. Paranormal events early in the story are never given even a hint of explanation. A character lives for years in a town without food—again, without explanation.

Still, I found the story engaging. I did enjoy the paranormal touches and the exploration of groupthink and mental illness. Camilla Sten is an author I would read again.