Community Pride

We've lived in our community, in New Mexico, for a year, now. We have only met one of our neighbors, and we knew that another neighbor was a teacher at our children's school. We did not have a sense of community.

However, that changed two days ago when our two French Bulldog puppies escaped our back yard, and we couldn't find them. Since they weren't immediately around our house, I just knew that someone had actually taken them. I started knocking on doors surrounding our home and surrounding the several acres of open desert behind us.

The first door I knocked on was to the teacher's house. She lived closest. She hadn't seen them, but she took the time out of her day to print several flyers for us. I distrubuted several of them, until the heat drove me inside my house for a while.

While I had to rest, it was a working rest, where I energetically grounded myself and my puppies to me, and visualized them being safe and returned to us within the next few hours. Then, I returned to me search and targeted the houses that were closest to the open desert behind our home.

I left several flyers, and, within an hour, I started receiving phone calls saying they had seen the puppies, and it had begun to form a bread-crumb trail to them, or, rather, them to us. It gladdened my heart because I also saw the people who answered their doors immediately start looking around their property for me. Some of them even got in their vehicles to search. I was a stranger to them and the temperature was over 100 degrees, but they were kindly going out of their way for me.

Very soon I received a phone call from a vet tech who had my puppies. They had already been taken several miles away from our home. To add more of a sense of pride for my community, the women who returned them to me refused to take any money for helping me. I met many of my neighbors that day, but I still don't actually know them. However, I'm so proud of their responsiveness and that it felt like we all worked together to bring my puppies home.