Rock Steady

Because I’m the luckiest person you know, when I was growing up, my parents had a lake house. It was close enough to town that Dad could commute to work from there, so we spent our entire summers at the lake. In fact, my mom was known to be in the car, in the driveway, with the engine idling, waiting for me to get home from the last day of school so we could leave for the summer immediately.

One perfect summer afternoon when I was high school age, my sister, mother, and I were relaxing on the dock when we saw a man we didn’t know brazenly walk into our cottage. Well, that’s not what you want to see. My mom told us to absolutely stay where we were, and she would go investigate. I was scared for her, but at least on the way up the hill to our cottage, she stopped at the house next door and told our neighbor what was going on and that if she didn’t come back out of the house in a few minutes to call the police. I guess that didn’t seem like a safe enough plan to our neighbor, because a few seconds after Mom continued up the hill, I saw the neighbor come out of her house, quickly scan the ground, pick up a big rock, and race up to our place. She had Mom’s back! That made me feel much better. Two against one, and one of them was armed with a rock.

Mom found the man in my parent’s bedroom, dripping water on the floor from his wet bathing suit, using the phone to call in sick. Turns out he had been invited to join friends at a dock a few doors down, agreed with my assessment that it was a perfect summer day, and decided to extend his stay and therefore needed to tell his boss he was too ill to go into work. Not being familiar with his friend’s cottage, he simply walked into the wrong one. Although perhaps not the world’s most honest employee, he was not there to rob or attack us, so that was a big relief.

I share this story because that rock-wielding neighbor passed away this weekend and I want to honor her as being one of the best next-door neighbors ever. It’s one thing to share your hospitality, food, and home, and to be warm, friendly, and fun, all of which she did and was, but potentially following you into danger like that is above and beyond, and absolutely what she was like.