How It All Started: A Bicycle, a Host Family, and Three Italian Puppies

I’ve always been someone who follows the pull. When something grabs you — really grabs you — you don’t argue with it. You just go.

The Bicycle Trip

I was cycling through the Italian countryside. No itinerary, no agenda. Just pedaling through these ancient little roads lined with cypress trees and crumbling stone walls, stopping wherever felt right. I ended up staying with a host family in one of those small towns that doesn’t show up on most maps.

They fed me like I was their own daughter. Homemade pasta, wine from the neighbor’s vineyard, espresso so strong it could wake the dead. Every meal was an event. Every conversation went on for hours. I remember sitting at their long wooden table thinking, this is what it means to be alive.

And then I noticed their dogs.

These curly, woolly, bright-eyed creatures padding around the property like they owned the place — which, honestly, they kind of did. They weren’t jumpy or anxious. They were settled. Confident. One of them came and sat next to me in the garden one evening and just leaned into my leg. Didn’t ask for anything. Just chose to be near me.

That undid me.

I didn’t know their breed. I just knew I’d never felt that kind of connection with an animal before. It was quiet and immediate and completely real.

Lagotto Romagnoli. I learned the name later. But the feeling came first.

Thirty Years of Carrying It

I went home. Life kept happening — the way it does, relentlessly. I worked in Africa. I built things. I started over more than once. Eventually I found my way to a farm in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by ferns and rain and the kind of silence that lets you actually hear yourself think.

But through all of it — every country, every chapter, every reinvention — those dogs stayed with me. Not as a plan. More like a promise I’d made to myself that I hadn’t gotten around to keeping yet. The way their coats curled. The intelligence in their eyes. That calm, steady presence.

Thirty years is a long time to hold onto something. But some things you just don’t let go of.

The Call That Changed Everything

I reached back out to my host family. Thirty years later — and they remembered me. Their daughter had built a beautiful career in the fine food world. Truffles, artisan cheeses, olive oils. She understood the land, the traditions, the people who still work with their hands.

When I told her what I’d been carrying all these years, she didn’t miss a beat. She knew a truffle hunter — a real tartufaio, the kind who’s out in the forest before dawn, his dogs working the earth beside him. His Lagotto Romagnoli had won championships in truffle hunting competitions. These weren’t pets. These were dogs with purpose, bred from lines that carried centuries of instinct and intelligence.

She made the introduction. And just like that, a 30-year-old dream had a heartbeat.

Three Puppies Across the Ocean

I bought three puppies from the truffle hunter. Convinced a dear friend to help me navigate the paperwork, the flights, the logistics of getting three tiny Italian dogs across the Atlantic. It was a production, to put it mildly.

But when they arrived — when those three curly, wiggly, bright-eyed puppies hit the grass on my farm for the first time — everything clicked. Noses down, tails up, already exploring like they’d been here in a past life. Already home.

I stood in the mud in my boots, rain on my face, watching them, and I thought: this is what I was always heading toward.

Why This Matters to Me

I’m AKC registered. Not because someone told me I should be, but because I hold myself to the highest standard when it comes to how we treat the animals in our care. I’ve seen what carelessness does — in the world, in communities, in how we treat living beings. I refuse to be part of that.

These dogs are not a product. They are not inventory. They are family. They sleep in my house. They greet me every morning like the world just started over. They remind me, daily, that joy is not something you have to earn — it’s something that shows up on four legs and leans against you in the garden.

Every puppy that leaves this farm carries a thread of something that started a long time ago — at a table in Italy, with people who fed a stranger like she was family, and a dog who sat down beside me and quietly rearranged my entire life.

Some things are worth waiting 30 years for.