It Can All Change in a Twinkling of an Eye

They say most accidents happen within a few blocks or miles of your home. Today, I got a taste of that.
Normally, our neighbor, Mike, brings up the newspaper from our driveway and puts it in the container on our porch. This is because neither my husband nor I can easily walk that distance. We both use either canes or walkers and the drive is full of rocks and stones, making it difficult for us and somewhat unsafe because it would be easy to trip and fall. So this morning I told my husband we'd get in the car and he could get out and get the paper. That delighted him, because a day without the daily paper is like a day without sunshine to him.

Our mailbox is just this side of the saguaro in the center.

Our property apparently has an easement just to the west of us for people who have built their homes behind the properties down there. There are no houses directly behind us. I've noticed over the past few months that there is more traffic using our driveway to exit onto the main road. But since we do not go out that much, I've never actually been present outside when the used our driveway to exit. Driveway is a very loose term. There is dirt where people drive on several sides of cactus and saguaros between our house and the one next door.

As I pulled up to the mail box area for my husband to get out, I looked in the rearview mirror and there was a white truck pulled up right behind us. My plan was to just back up when my husband had picked up the paper and gotten the mail, then circle our house to where we park, never leaving our property. Now I couldn't. I then pulled out across the street so that I could return into our drive, and I was just a little aggravated. The white truck driven by a woman pulled out to the west. I looked for traffic, because this is a dangerous road to live on, and began to go across the road back into our driveway when I caught movement off to the right and a car came SPEEDING at us. I jammed on my brakes and they missed us by inches, swerving off the road a little. "Where did that come from?" I asked.  Both of us were quite shaken by the near miss. No, our lives didn't flash by in those seconds, but we really could have been quite dead out there right in front of our house. Whew!!!

Our neighbor was out front and came over to see how we were. He said this was why he was moving, because the people just speed along here and ignore the law that says stop when a school bus is stopped whether you are on one side of the street or the other. His son, who just turned seven today, has had several near misses of being hit because cars just didn't stop. The family couldn't take the anxiety of there cute little boy being hit by a speeding care. You say, "But that's illegal!" and you are right! But they do it anyway. The car that barely missed me was absolutely speeding down from the small hill and curve to our west ... definitely NOT going the 35 mile per hour speed limit.

Life is precious. And your life can change in a twinkling of an eye.