This is a post about appreciation.
In the summer of 2000, during a Mercury retrograde, we moved to our present home. The move itself was pretty much a disaster, trying to close on two homes on the same day and to move all our stuff. It included several thousand books, pets, and my dad, who was in a wheelchair at the time, with Parkinson’s. Our neighbors were a single mom with two young boys.
Megan and the oldest boy became good friends, but his mother had some strange concepts about animals. In the five years they were our neighbors, she went through numerous pets – dogs, birds, rodents – and discarded them as though they were Kleenex.
Her last dog, a gorgeous German shepherd she’d imported from Germany, lost out when a guy moved in who eventually became her second husband. She stopped exercising the dog and his hips went bad and she simply had him put down. A few days before she and her new husband were going to move, she told me she was going to release her son’s guinea pig into the wild. I told her that was cruel. The guinea pig had never been wild. I convinced her to give me the rodent and I eventually took it to a pet store and it was sold to a family that really wanted a guinea pig.
After they left, a new family moved in and for nearly 10 years now, they have been the best neighbors we’ve ever had, anywhere, ever. Annette is a Gemini, like me, born on the same day as my friend and script co-author, Hilary Hemingway. She’s a nut, like me, about animals. They have two dogs and two cats, mice, fish, and two snakes. Her husband, Kevin, is a commercial airline pilot and can fix anything. Their son is probably going to be a famous biologist some day and their daughter is a gem, who periodically drops by to ask for something good to read.
When we go away, Annette and her kids take care of our cats. When she goes away, we take care of her critters. But I don’t do snakes. They creep me out. I mean, I’ll do them if Annette and her family are going to be gone for an extended period, but it’s not my favorite thing.
Annette is an identical twin and she and her sister have had some stunning synchros over the years, especially in the telepathic area, and we’ve posted some of them and used a couple of their stories in our synchronicity books.
Annette, like her daughter, is a big reader and has pretty much exhausted the MacGregor library. She has a great eye for what works in a novel and I’m going to give her this current novel to read after Rob goes through it. A fresh perspective can’t hurt.
There is something comforting about meeting up with someone you like in the space between your yards, and sharing stuff from any given day. When we meet between our houses, our dogs invariably play, with Noah chasing Fergie, their German short-haired pointer, around the yard, the two of them playing tug-of-war with a stick, a Frisbee. Quite often, Annette’s orange tiger cat darts into our house for some catnip and Copper looks so much like our orange tiger, Simba, that I mistake one for the other.
What I have learned from good neighbors is that you never know where the friendship will lead. Given my political leanings, it’s strange that Annette is the only Republican woman with whom I have any interaction at all. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of politics, but in terms of kids, animals, and life in general, we seem to be on the same weird page.
