Well, now, this is a weak post—you may have noticed by now I’m aiming at weekly posts on Fridays. This post is short because I put up a “New Year” post yesterday. If you choose to click below, you’ll find a local story.

The brief story…

Years ago, in the early 1980s, local homes were being burgled in our neighborhood. Nearly every house— or so it seemed, and especially those not lived in full time—had been hit. We had six fully-grown Afghan Hounds, so that’s probably why our home wasn’t touched. One of our dogs guarded the house to the north (the meter-reader caused him to raise a fuss), so that house was also untouched even though it was nearly always unoccupied. However, most everyone else we knew, and every short-term rental had been broken into. We asked for help from the sheriff, who sent an officer to a community meeting in a local home. He advised we get guns. What terrible advice from law-enforcement! No one did that so far as I know, because the suspected criminals were a couple of local teenagers (or maybe only one of them). Mostly what was stolen was snack food, cheese from the fridge, and trinkets. The only real and expensive loss was repairing windows damaged to gain access to the house. When rumors went around that the house they’d recently burgled was the home of an elderly couple and the wife had cancer, the tea set they’d stolen was returned in a pillowcase dropped into the back garden. It was silver-plate and not valuable but precious. Maybe those boys were up to no good, and then maybe they were. That was the end of the burglaries.