I remember my dog... Sandy. (She was sort-of a beagle mix... white with large medium brown patches & black patches around the eyes.) I was about... oh... 8 or 9 I guess. I had been asking my parents for a dog. At the time we lived in a small city in a rented house that had a large open porch. One morning we got up & there was a puppy curled up asleep on the porch by our front door. The house next door had a porch that was half enclosed with a rug on the floor & a couch in the enclosed end. But the puppy curled up on our bare front porch. I don't know if my parents tried to find the puppy's owner. But, either way, she became my dog.

After Sandy had been with us for about a year or so, she disappeared one day & was gone for a week or two. I was distraught. One morning I was upstairs in bed. I heard my father saying something like... go on... go upstairs... It was Sandy. She was back! I remember my father mentioning there had been a news report of a dog being fished out of the river that ran through town. We never knew if that was Sandy. But we wondered.

Unfortunately there's sort-of a sad ending to this story. (I know this thread is supposed to be just about good things. And Sandy's presence in my life was a very good thing. But I can't tell this story without bringing it to it's conclusion.) Years later we had moved out to the country. (That is a story in-&-of itself.) Sandy had had a bare spot, about the size of a quarter, on her side for quite a while. My parents never took her to the vet. (They never took me to the doctor or the dentist either unless it was absolutely necessary. We were poor.) Eventually Sandy was not doing well. So my parents finally decided to take her to a vet. The morning we were to take her, I went outside to fetch her. She was laying on her side in the sun beside the house... dead. We buried her out behind the foundation of an old barn that had long since been torn down.