I’ve learned a couple of things in the last few days.

The first is that a whole lot of people who want to be pet sitters read the local newspaper. We really need a pet sitter, so we bought an ad for a month. So far more than a dozen people have responded. We have met four so far.

There’s the divorced mother of one who lives with her own mother down at the other end of Texas Valley. Then there’s the young woman who just moved to town. She works part time at a chain bookstore and plans to give her two weeks’ notice on another part-time job. She has a degree in meteorology and geography. Another young woman does bookwork for her brother’s business.

We just talked to a woman who also lives in Texas Valley who lost her husband in a car wreck last year. She went to a pet store to buy some cat collars and ended up adopting a black lab mix. She said she thought when she heard the dog’s story that she was going to rescue the dog, but the dog ended up rescuing her.

Another woman had rescued about 40 cats some years ago. She got them spayed and neutered and then took care of them until, one by one, they all died of old age.

I found out when I worked as a reporter many years ago that everyone has a story, and they all want to tell it. All you have to do is listen. They aren’t necessarily big stories, but they’re big enough to them. And, sometimes, it really is a big story. I used to live down the street from an older couple. I usually spoke to them when I walked my dog past their house. Eventually I learned that the man had been on a Southern Airways flight from Huntsville, Al, to Atlanta in 1977 when it ran into a severe thunderstorm over Rome, lost both engines, and then crash landed on a rural highway in the little town of New Hope. He told about walking out of the plane, shielding his face from the flames with his hands, while other passengers sat in their seats, struggling to get out without realizing that their seatbelts were still fastened. Seventy-two people died, including seven on the ground.

So, if you listen long enough, you hear the story, big or small.

But that’s not the other thing I learned. That other thing I learned is that I would really like to say yes to all the people who want to pet sit for us, or at least most of them. Unfortunately, we just need one. We’re leaning toward the divorced mother of one, but we still have five possibilities to interview.

I wish we could get someone to find a pet sitter for us so we wouldn’t have to say no to anyone. But then we wouldn’t get to hear their stories.