Skip to main content

Good Neighbors


We sit around the table eating ice-cream cake. Mr. Lee and Miss Norma have trekked across their front lawn to join us for Stuart's birthday.


Mr. Lee is an elfin looking man with an easy smile. I cannot guess his age. Old would be a close estimate. He still works full time as a court reporter. He mows his lawn with a push mower and saws wood for the fireplace with a chainsaw. He walks on his treadmill at two in the morning when he has trouble sleeping.

Mr. Lee is walking history. Listening to him counts as school. He worked as a horse exerciser when he was twelve. During the depression, he finished his last two years of high school while living and working full time at a horse barn. He laughs as he tells us that people liked to visit upwind of him. He wanted to make a career out of racehorses. His dad discouraged him because racing was controlled by the mob. Instead, he slept in an Illinois recruiting office for two weeks waiting until he turned seventeen. At seventeen he was old enough to serve in the navy. He served on the Atlantic and Pacific fronts during WWII. The officers he served under as a court reporter liked him so much that when they were transferred, he went with them. This meant a few years in Hawaii. He recorded several big trials including when the Missouri ran aground in the Chesapeake Bay in the early fifties. He retired from the navy before I was born! The kids are most impressed that Mr. Lee knows shorthand.

The chain link fence that divides our yards separates our dogs but allows us to visit. I used to check wunderground.com for the weather. Now I just ask Miss Norma. She gives me the five-day forecast. Several times a day, Jill and Jackie O., a long-haired Dachshund and a Jack Russell Terrier, dash out on their lawn. They bark vigorously. They are heralds running before royalty. Their message...Miss Norma is outside! The children drop what they are doing and rush out. They form a line along the fence. Miss Norma is a good listener. The children entrust their hearts to her. They sit in her lawn chairs and visit. They come home with stories about her animals and the places she has lived. Many conversations at the dinner table begin with, "Miss Norma said..."

Miss Norma watches our animals from time to time. Our children bring her warm coffee cake and cinnamon rolls. John pokes through her shelves and brings home National Geographic magazines from her monstrous collection.

Robert Frost writes, good fences make good neighbors. In our case it is true.

Posted by Picasa

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Finding Rest: Part Two (Scroll down three posts to read this story from the beginning)

Why share such a personal story ? I share it because I have talked to enough women to know that underneath the makeup and the matching outfits and the small talk that make up our exteriors, we are a broken people. To pretend otherwise creates isolation. Thoughtful honesty creates closer relationships and greater understanding. When we share the way God works in the difficult things of life it encourages first oneself and then others. For some of us, the pieces have been patched and restored and there is wholeness where there was none before. But some of us are walking wounded, barely hanging on and wondering if there is hope. We have a choice. We can either be completely shattered by bitterness, depression and anger or we can lay the fragments before the One who can take the sharp slivers and jagged pieces and create a beautiful, productive life. Here is the conclusion to John's story. When John was ten, he was sullen and moody and difficult and so was I. But I was no longer proud.

4-H Exhibits-Updated

Update: Blue ribbons all around! 4 of our projects will go onto the state fair. John's headboard exceeds size limitations and so we will lug it home tomorrow. We are relieved. That thing is heavy! ************* For the past few weeks we have been busy sewing, sawing, quilling and painting 4-H projects. The kids have been in 4-H for about a month and they started with a bang. The annual 4-H fair is tomorrow. So this morning we loaded these projects and four kids wearing slippers into the car. The fifth one had sense enough to wear flip-flops. (The other four complained as we pulled out of the driveway that their feet were sweating.) John reclining against the headboard that he built with Stuart. He wrote the 10 Commandments of Table Saw Safety to accompany this project. Claire's quilling project. Lauren modeling the apron that she sewed. Lauren and the dog painting she has been working on in art class for the past few months. Faith and her quilling project. So now

Aviary Amphitheater (Wordless? Wednesday)

We're slow starters in the morning. The children lie on the sofas and read. Charlie sits and eats a graham cracker and a bowl of yogurt at the table before breakfast. Lauren and I take turn cooking oatmeal, or muffins, or scones... We eat somewhere between ten and eleven. Today, in the midst of all this leisure, the house became exceptionally quiet and I went to figure out why because "too quiet" is never a good thing. Except that it was today. I peeked out the living room window into the backyard and found five chairs and five children lined up on the patio. I opened the door and everybody shushed me. "Hush, Mama. We're watching the birds. Come sit with us" Six or seven hummingbirds were zipping around the feeder, frantic to fill their little gas tanks before they migrate. The children were silent, heads tipped up, eyes squinting against the morning light. I went in to get the camera. I took a few pictures of the children but could not capture the hyperacti