Patches of Community

April 23, 2024
Beloved:
    “Do you like cookies?” he asked, and I nearly fell over laughing.  He’s the owner of Buck, one of Birdy’s best friends in the neighborhood.  Buck is a silky red golden retriever, the only dog who truly matches Birdy’s frenetic energy.  Her other bestie is Cora, a tiny cattle dog whose coat looks like a Chocolate Moose Cookies & Cream Blizz.  Yesterday I shared some hot spot treatment for Buck and he wanted to give me something.  Thus the ask about cookies, and my glee at the idea of me not liking them.
    Call them blessings, silver linings or, simply, the bright side – they have amounted to a soft landing in a new place, and I am sometimes caught off guard by the gratitude that swells up in me.  The beauty of these tiny flowerbeds.  The daily interactions between neighbors outside working in their yards and walking their dogs.  I feel welcome and watched over when I’m home and missed when I am gone.  My next door neighbor keeps an eye out for the trash truck to pass and pushes all our bins to our garage doors so they don’t roll into the street.  Such a kindness.  Another carries a grocery sack for picking up litter on her daily walk.  Another man hides dog treats all over the neighborhood and the pups lose their minds hunting for them.* ​

Best of all for me is knowing these little patches of community blanket every habitable hill and valley, prairie and plain upon the planet.  In India I walked through a tiny village carved out of a mountain side.  I saw kids in a classroom and shops the size of my laundry room.  The traffic was entirely by foot and the occasional motor scooter.  But the whole place was as full of life as any neighborhood anywhere.  People drinking coffee and watching the world go by.  Cooking and hanging up their laundry.  Mamas hoisting babies and toddlers as they did their errands.  All of it compacted into a much smaller area than I would have imagined possible.  The lowest ridge of the village was high above the river at the bottom of the ravine.  They came and went to other places via a footbridge to a busy road with a parking lot for cars and the green and yellow taxis called tuk-tuks.
India, South Korea, Palestine-Israel, Normandy and Scotland – everywhere I’ve ever been it’s always the same.  Removed from touristy places are people living side by side doing all of the same things necessary to make a life, a home and a community, acting out our humanity as we have since we first figured out that feeding one another is a far more efficient way to get through time and space.  If one plows the field while another teaches the children and another keeps watch for bears, everything gets done in the time we’re each allowed.  Leaving a margin as well, don’t you know, for growing flowers, walking dogs and passing restful time with one another.

This neighborliness is what makes war the horror that it is, the violent destruction of humanity at our softest, kindest, best – living in the sweet patches of community where we are welcome when we’re home and missed when we’re away.  I can’t imagine the trauma it must be to lose one’s neighborhood so completely as people do in war, to be so traumatically displaced from everything familiar and necessary to an ordinary life.  Heartbreaking, I should think, and all the more reason to remember that life can go from sugar to salt in a heartbeat, so for this moment, we are wise to be grateful and humble for the sweetness of these days.  
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~peace & prayers, 
pastor annette

*Apparently crows have been finding the treats, causing quite the rumpus among the dogs used to finding their usual snacks.