“APHRODITE” … our GODDESS OF LOVE, 1973

This beautiful Samoyed became part of our family in 1973. Her name was “Aphrodite” and we teased her relentlessly about being the “Goddess of Love”. Only in the months to come would we realize how aptly she’d been named.

“Aphrodite” settled into our household as if she’d always been there. We were a family of 5...myself, my husband and 3 teen aged children. We also had 4 German Shorthair Pointers and a quarter-horse named Thunder. We were living in a small, rural town in Upstate New York and we welcomed our new addition.

The other animals were penned but “Aphrodite” had been used to a city apartment so she became our “house dog”. She was good as gold and we couldn’t have been more pleased.

About three months after “Aphrodite” came to live with us she came into heat. My husband was very old fashioned where this was concerned and he did not believe in “fixing” his female animals. “We’ll keep her in the house”, he said, “no problem.” and that’s what we tried to do.

This proved to be an impossibility. There must have been 5 or 6 Adonis-like dogs milling around our front yard and the pull was too strong for our “Aphrodite”. At the first chance she was out the door and away they went in a flash. We searched for her but with no luck and it was two days before she returned.

We had a large open field across from our house and my husband was the first to spy her. “Look at that little minx”, he said and sure enough, here she came. She was positively glowing as she trotted across the field. She had a big smile on her face and wasn‘t the least bit interested in the line of exhausted looking male dogs that were straggling to keep up with her.

Now she was happy to be home and the mixed-breed puppies that she inevitably had were easy to place since they were an adorable combination of brown fluff and her big smile.

But it became more and more difficult to keep her at home and we worried about the busy turnpike nearby. We had friends in West Virginia who loved her too and when they offered her a home on their 200 acre farm we let her go.

It broke our hearts to see her leave but we knew that she was a free soul and needed to wander. “Aphrodite” closely resembled her namesake, the “Greek Goddess of Love” and I can imagine the two of them roaming those West Virginia hills even today.