Living in paradise

Because I must divert attention away from my last entry concerning my recent confession (too many requests to hear it) I will blog again.
There are really beautiful places you visit where you want to take photos so you will never forget the image. There are also beautiful times of your life that you don't want to forget, so the images have to be written.
Tonight I met with my old neighbors from Nashville for FHE. Amy and Chris lived in the other half of the duplex on Van Leer Dr. It was Utopia.
We didn't have shared walls, just a shared front porch with the shared garage on the backside of it. We did have shared lives, however.
We enjoyed a large driveway and a huge backyard. The yards in our neighborhood weren't separated by fences. Some had high hedges, but there was a break in the line of bushes between our back yard and the Wootens, whose backyard joined ours.
The Wootens had a dog, Whitney, that would play catch and run around with our kids. She also ate the forgotten Popsicles and helped locate garter snakes in the grass. And she pooped in her own yard. The Wootens also had Jackson, a 3 year old boy, who would let himself out of his house in the morning when he woke up and let himself into our house to stare at my son until he woke up. Many a morning I would wake to find Jackson in his pajamas at the foot of the bottom bunk waiting for his friend to wake up.
Each day Amy and I would bring out leftovers from the night before, and whatever else we could find, and feed our kids together at the picnic table. We didn't keep track of whose food went to whose kid or who brought the lemonade, we just fed whichever kids sat down to eat. Whitney would eat the extra food spilled under the table and we would trash the paper plates and cups.
Our kids would ride bikes up and down the drive that wound from the backyard to the front, always stopping at the end before going into the street. They would scale the huge magnolia tree, generous with low thick branches. They would run barefoot through the grass, carefully avoiding the tall grass in front by the spring because of the threat of chiggers. When the creek that ran through the Wootens yard would occasionally get a trickle of water running through it, the kids would search for crawdads.
Amy and I would borrow and lend our kids at a moment's notice. Amy would go for a quick walk (finding a stray turtle for Luke to keep as a pet), or I would run down to the grocery store for milk, and we would cover for each other. The kids just obeyed whichever Mom was nearest.
We'd retrieve each others' mail, help the kid learning to ride a two-wheeler out of the ditch, search the bushes/hidden fort for the kid not reporting for lunch, bring over hot cookies to the others' kitchen and work together to get the stray birds out of the garage.
At night our husbands would come home and we'd repeat the outside community meal made from shared ingredients. Then we would sit and talk and laugh until the sun shone in the drops of water hanging in the air, making everything look strangely golden and misted, and the lightning bugs would start their show. We'd round up our kids to the tub to scrub off bloodied and dirty toes and sticky happy faces.
It was one of the best times I've ever had.