Monte Vista Village, Toxic Soup (The Survivor Diaries) Read Free

world. I had always been the unofficial “prepper” in the family. With my emergency box of band aids and ointment, seed vault and hand cranked NOAA Radio and Charger-in-one, I am the self-appointed disaster readiness professional of our family. If I had only known it would come to this, I would have been way better at my job. Something tells me that we are not even close to being prepared for what is to come.
    Mark has actually been helpful getting some things ready, despite his superstition about planning too much. I just can’t see that me being prepared is the reason we might be in the path of global destruction.
    I needed to get out of the house while my husband focused on his grilling. I hadn’t really been going out very much for the last couple of days. I just expected, and wanted, to die in my own home with my family if it was going to happen any time soon. I didn’t want to be caught at the grocery store when it happened. That’s a too unceremonious way to go. But at the moment, I only felt the need to get out and walk for a while.
    For the last few days I have been thinking about getting to know our neighbors. I had always thought it sad that Mom had lived here, in the same house, for nearly three decades and barely knew any of our neighbors. My need to meet them wasn’t exactly altruistic. I thought it best to begin to compile a list of those people closest to us; what they did for a living, how old were they, and how willing did they seem to come together as a community, if it came to that. I wanted to start a list of assets, so to speak. Did they own generators; have they been stock piling food and water? Whatever they were willing to disclose, I was there to hear.
    So, I reached for my tablet when it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be that helpful for the long run to use anything that required electricity. Instead, I found a clipboard, some paper and a pen, and I set off about my task, not knowing what to expect.
    In our defense, none of our neighbors ever seemed to talk to each other, either. We have had a bit of an ongoing feud with the people to the right of us. They left the dogs out, howling until the wee hours of the night all of the time, and we were known to yell at the little yappers over the fence when it got to be too much. You know, just typical neighbor stuff. The idealistic, close knit neighborhood, with block parties and long chats in the front yard, we were not. Even just after we moved here when I was a child in the early 1980’s, we never even trick or treated, nor have we ever had any children come to our door and demand candy or reap the tricks that might befall us if we did not deliver the goods. We never had any sense of community what-so-ever. Hopefully, my walk from house to house today will have an impact.
    I put the leash on Hershey , our handsome Chocolate Lab, and started at the house next door on the left. Sadly, we had never spoken more than a hello to those people. If I recalled, they were an older couple with a quiet, small, white dog. We have never seen much activity from them, and assume that they owned other homes where they spent most of their time.
    I walked down their long set of stair s, that matched our own. Like ours, many of the homes in our neighborhood sat on stilts on the hillside. We all used to have beautiful views of the bay until the trees in our forests grew so tall that we could only see the mostly clear, blue water from the street above our homes.
    I took a deep breath, and actually felt that old shyness well up from my childhood as I knocked on the first door. Nothing. I tried the bell, forgetting that we had no electricity. Finally, I knocked one more time, not sure if they were just afraid to come to the door with everything going on, or they just were not home.
    I left and tried the next house. Same problem. I guessed that I would be encountering this quite a lot today, and I was right.
    Three houses down, I walked down the ramp and I finally found