We are a Blessed People

(A story written a few years ago while I was sick in bed)

I am sick in bed, where I am most of the time now days...I have spent the last five years having illnesses that were just enough to be bad, but not quite bad enough to kill me. Almost like I'm being teased. If I'm going to die, then let the big one come, but if it isn't then let all these illnesses just go away so I can continue to live a normal productive life. When I say normal and productive I mean just living without the word doctor in my vocabulary and being able to enjoy the small things that give me joy. You see, I live in a very wonderful, beautiful normal, yet peculiar neighborhood.

We are protected by a huge mountain almost on top of our heads which is beautiful in whatever season we happen to be in........I was just interrupted from my writing by a neighbor who brought me soup, because I am sick. The thing that makes this so incredible is that my friend that made the soup has cancer. But of course, here in our neighborhood a little thing like cancer doesn't stop you from making soup for your friend.

To make the reader understand what this story is about I have to go back a few years, like about 30 years. A group of young people from different walks of life someway or another ended up in this corner of a valley, in a neighborhood on a hill below a beautiful mountain called Lone Peak. We were all pretty young. Just getting started in our first homes, excited to put yards in and have families, which is exactly what we did.

We worked on yards, furnished our homes and had lots of children. We didn't think our lives would be anything but perfect. I don't know whether we were prepared or not for what lay ahead, maybe we grew into our preparedness together. As I see it we still don't know a whole lot, but we know more than we did back then, we continue to not get what's going on, but we continue to live through our lives, learning and growing with each other. Before I introduce these people who are such a part of my life, I have to say that without them there would be no story, for we have lived, laughed and cried through every day stuff. Tragedies and even a little mystery and intrigue which we solved, not by gossiping over the fence, but by doing real honest to goodness detective work, over the fence. This is a much higher form of information-gathering than gossip, if it is in the form of of trying to solve a mystery, like, "Who chopped the Foppler's bonsai tree down?" (My children were out of the state and therefore not a part of this fiasco, although had they been here would have been front and center). But, you know, sometimes mean neighbors deserve to get their bonsai's whacked, and that's what happened.

It took our fledgling detective agency awhile, but we did figure out who did it. We had to be properly sorry, but we were glad when those neighbors moved away. They didn't fit - they yelled at the kids and didn't welcome our friendliness, and so off they went. Several years later a lovely family named the Caldwell's moved in. They love our kids and we love theirs, they plant normal bushes and have become a part of our neighborhood as though they have always lived here.