Welcome to the Neighborhood

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Separation.

You never  know  what’s  going  on  behind  the  walls, whether you’re on the outside thinking about the inside or vice versa. Last night, while we were having a Gathering and messing around with quantum physics, our neighbors had no idea what we were up to…and we didn’t know what was going on outside either.

The Long-Awaited Honest-to-God Secret to Being Happy

 

Grendel, our little ADHD puppy, has a protective streak in  him—and a ferocious, all-business bark that frightened my guests when  they heard it. We couldn’t imagine what he was barking at. We weren’t  even playing with the Ouija board and the only entities inside the house were definitely friendly ones!

Since one of my guests just had a bit of eye surgery done, I transported her to and from my house. Um…by car. I haven’t perfected the other techniques yet.

On the way to her house when the Gathering was over, we saw a  couple of houses down the street with toilet paper hanging from trees,  bushes, roof tops. It was the good kind, too—not that “lowest bidder”  stuff they buy for the stalls at work.

This afternoon, the girls and I missed our showing of Tristan and Isolde, one of my favorite legends and my favorite Arthurian Tarot card for the 2 of Cups, so we headed home early. When the girls and I reached our street, we noticed most of the toilet paper had been cleaned up…but our next door neighbors had been snared in the random fun last night and their yard was still trashed. In hindsight, Grendel’s fearsome barking probably scared the vandals away from our house.

The elderly couple who had lived there recently sold the house. Busy as we are, we hadn’t seen a new neighbor move in, so I sent the girls to check on them and let them know the girls would clean up the  vandalism. The girls happily obliged me, with nary a grumble.

Flying By Night novel

Little  did  we  know  that  the  former  neighbors  had moved out, another elderly couple had moved in a few days ago, and they were too  sick to get out and clean up the yard. Not only that, but they’d put up a Martin Luther King flag right be- fore the toilet papering had been done.  They’d been worried that their flag was unwelcome in the neighborhood and they’d been vandalized because of it. They weren’t well enough to walk outside or down the street to see that the deed had been random.

The  girls  gave  them  a  little  nicer  welcome  to  the neighborhood  and  were  done  cleaning  up  the  mess  in— seriously—about two minutes.

Definitely a feel-good moment for everyone. Me, I got a chuckle. The witch next door was glad to be of help, and very proud of her daughters, too. And Grendel, well, he got a treat.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *