Building Community -- A Continuous Process

We had a marvelous gathering the other day at our home. Preparations began several days ahead of time with a major organization meltdown (mine) over the mess of our house. I'm not naturally a very organized person. But I go through sprints of it. There are days when I just can't sit down because I want to find a place for everything! And then normal life comes back to me and my living space gets cluttered again. This past weekend, however, we were having guests over to our house! We couldn't let them come if they couldn't walk through the kitchen to get to the dining room because of all the unopened boxes and piles of papers! So I began to furiously organize and finally got all my fragile dishes placed nicely in my beautiful new (old!)hutch. Time to kick those now-empty boxes downstairs!

By mid-day on Sunday our house was spectacular. We could have held a ball in our kitchen and dining room with all the space we had opened up and we were ecstatic! Our guests began to arrive exactly on time at 3:00pm (the american neighbors we invited). They were thrilled to see the progress our home had made in the past 6 months. Neighborhood stories about our home are many and always very interesting. Such as all the many times our immediate neighbors had to help pull a car off the embankment because it couldn't make it down our driveway. Or the morning of the drug raid that happened because a nice tenant living in our home was growing marijuana. Apparently he tried to escape the police by jumping out the window in the master bathroom.

All-in-all our neighbors are very happy to have us living here now and we look forward to a very positive friendship. We have many things in common as well. They are avid hikers and have mentioned some wonderful trails in the area that I hope to visit soon. They are also dog lovers and shared some wonderful stories of dogs that they now have or have been previously a part of their lives. Jane from next door talked about a 147lb German Shepherd dog who grew to that size because of an almost exclusively elk diet in his early years. Jim had been hunting and brought home an elk. They had very carefully packed it away in the freezer and went on vacation. Unfortunately when they returned it was to find that the freezer had just failed. The meat still seemed good and they didn't want to toss it so every day Jane would cook some up for their dog. No wonder he made 147lbs!

In addition to wonderful neighbor experiences we had a variety of other friends over and I was amazed by how well they mixed together. Even though they had a hard time understanding each other Jane managed to keep up a wonderful conversation with our hispanic friends and Jim was already talking architecture with a man recently relocated here from Peru!

The neighbors from down the street even showed me a few plants growing in my yard that were edible! And we talked about making natural cleaners and handsoaps for the house.

What a marvelous day and positive future for our lives here!