Vitafamiliae

I’ve got another Samson story for you…

Our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, I had class and Andrew got home from work before me.  When I arrived home, there was a trail of rose petals all over the house leading to a card inviting me to a fancy dinner with my cute hubby.  But Hubby was missing.  So was the dog.  I figured he was out taking Samson for a walk and wandered around in my happy romantic daze.

And then there was a knock on the door.

I opened the door to find Andrew with his arms full of dog.  Or at least, it must have been the dog.  It was covered in mud, but I detected Samson’s signature drool underneath a layer of muck.  Then the odor assaulted my senses and I took a step back, almost shutting the door in Andrew’s face.

He explained, “I had to take him on a walk so he wouldn’t eat the rose petals.  He got in the mud and then he rolled in something foul and now he’s GOT to have a bath.”

Understatement of the year.

We wrapped him in towels (no doubt the pretty ones we’d gotten as wedding presents) and carried him straight to our bathroom.  Andrew tossed him in the tub and we started wetting him down.  Somehow, Samson, feeling pretty frisky from all the excitement and the bathing and such, broke free, jumped out of the tub, and took off into the bedroom.

I don’t remember how we got him back to the tub.  It’s all sort of a blur of slipping, sliding, mud, and yelling.  At any rate, we wrestled him back to his bath, only to have him give a good ol’ doggy shake-shake-shake in the tub.  Red Alabama mud went EVERYWHERE.

By the time we had the dog and the bathroom clean, I had a roaring headache and we settled on sandwiches for dinner.  A few short months later, we moved out of that apartment and we passed it on to some friends of ours.  I believe I may have mentioned her a time or twelve, Aubrey.

Many years later, I was reminiscing about this story with Aubrey and I mentioned Samson shaking in the tub.  She stopped me, paused, and said, “You know, I used to lie in that tub soaking and stare at the ceiling, wondering how on earth that mud got on the ceiling.”

Now she knows.  Apparently, it isn’t safe to live anywhere we’ve been before.  The ceilings are guaranteed to be trashed.