The Neighborly Gnomes and the Pop-up Yard Decorations

There is a strange house down the road from our neighborhood.  It's on a side road from the main road we use to get to and from our sub-division, but their back yard is along that main road.  It's a large yard.  It must be more than an acre, going down a hill, with a creek that goes under the road we drive on daily and then back up another slope with woods and a clearing.  But it's a strange place.

I never see the people who live there out working in their back yard.  I don't see them building new bridges over the creek, but then there it is one day.  I don't see them erect the Nativity scene early in the holiday season and I never see them pull it down, even after it's been there some time into January.

There are strange retaining walls that turn in towards themselves and then turn back out again with a mirroring retaining wall ten feet away that seems to make a sort of maze-like channel through part of the clearing.  But it's a maze with two turns and it doesn't come from anything or go to anywhere.

Other interesting yard-developments happen from time to time, but it's always just something that appears.  These are yard things that should take hours or days to complete and yet suddenly their just done and there's no sign of anyone.

I never see anyone on the back of the expansive porches visible on the back of the house from the road.  It's as if the house were an entry way into the side of a mountain where odd garden gnomes like to live.  From time to time, these gnomes venture into to the world around them and do some sort of strange "beautification project" and then disappear into the night.

Maybe someday with all my driving back and forth on the road with the view of their odd yard, I'll catch a glimpse of these unconventional garden gnomes.

The Big Boy Update:  "On the top."  "The big one."  These are two of my son's most popular sentences of late.  He likes to tell you something is on the top of something else.  It's usually some sort of vehicular thing.  He also likes to ask for the big one of things.  He doesn't want the small slice, he wants "the big one" of whatever it is you have.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Pigtails!  Her hair is long enough to put into pigtails now, and boy is she cute.  I sent her to school in pigtails today but I think her little head was hurting from the tightness because she was unhappy about them when she got home so I took them out.  Did I mention cute though?

Someone Once Said:   It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person’s behavior. The most any leader can do is to encourage each one to be responsible for himself.