The little Cockapoo was Amy's saviour. In a world that appeared so capriciously cold, the dog was her anchor. How temporary that could be was something she was blind to, perhaps out of necessity, but it gave the rest of us a timeline to create a safe world of stable loving bonds for her to inhabit.
The cockapoo stood there as the love-child of a barbie doll and a teddy bear. Yet under that blonde cuddliness there was a real dog who wanted to do all the things real dogs do.
There were times I could see the wolf in that little Cockapoo, as if someone had ripped out a wolf's central nervous system and wired it into this human-approved form.
That little Cockapoo was a mud-magnet; if it was sloppy and smelly she was jumping in it, her tail wagging in canine joy.