When I lost Peaches, my dog of eighteen years, I was certain I would never have another dog. The loss was too much, and I could not imagine choosing to go through it again.

That certainty lasted about six months.

A friend kept gently encouraging me to reconsider. Eventually, I agreed to look.

One night, scrolling through Petfinder, I saw her. Her name was Asia. She had a scruffy face, a certain chaos around the eyes, and something that made me stop and say out loud, “That is my girl.”

She was found in Mexico and being fostered in Texas through Animal Rights Rescue. They sent me photographs of her dressed in little pink outfits. She looked so sweet and innocent that I had already decided to call her Sophie.

Then I brought her home.

Sophie turned out to be entirely the wrong name. She was tiny, fearless, and a complete lunatic. So she became Luna, short for lunatic.

The refined lady she is today came later. She prefers not to discuss the years before that.

A few years after Luna came home, I hired a pet psychic to speak with her. Among the many things she told me was that Luna had a problem with her bowls. She did not like drinking from metal and, apparently, felt it was beneath her.

I laughed because it sounded exactly like Luna. She has always preferred drinking from my water glass, and at restaurants she will wait for one rather than drink from a metal bowl.

But then I looked at the bowl sitting on my floor. I had considered our home down to the last hinge, yet the object Luna used every day was something I had never really thought about.

That conversation stayed with me. I began imagining a bowl made from natural stone, something functional and beautiful that could belong in the room as naturally as everything else in it.

Casa Legame grew from that simple idea: the things we choose for the animals we love deserve the same thought, care, and consideration as anything else in our homes.