Two Rescue Dogs Named After the Same Nowhere

My rescue greyhound came named Stanhoe — the shelter's best guess at the word on his collar tag, half worn away. It is nobody's dog name; it is, I eventually learned, a village of about two hundred people. I kept it because he answered to it.

At the dog park last spring, I called him, and two dogs came. Mine, and a bewildered spaniel belonging to a woman my age, who stared at me and said: 'How do you know his name?' Her rescue was also called Stanhoe. Also from a worn tag, also a shelter's guess — different shelter, different county, four years apart.

We did the dog-park laugh about it, and then we did the maths and stopped laughing. Two hand-engraved tags, two abandoned dogs, one micro-village neither of us had ever visited. Over coffee — the dogs insisted, they had become instantly inseparable, which should have been our first clue about the day's agenda — we compared notes. She was adopted as an infant, searching for her birth family on and off for a decade. I was donor-conceived, mildly curious, never pursued.