Brad and the Beaver Preserve

One day a nice man (I’ll call him Brad) came up to me after church and began talking about the neighborhood I’d recently moved into. He seemed to know a lot about it. It was one of those conversations where I quickly realized I’d missed some vital bit of information that would have made the whole thing make sense. That happens to me a lot. I did what I typically do in that situation—I gave vague but pleasant responses while mentally scrambling to figure out what exactly we were talking about. Here’s how the conversation went:

Brad: You enjoying your new neighborhood?

Me: Yes, we really are. It’s a great place to go for walks.

Brad: You see many beavers?

Me:(with slight hesitation) In my neighborhood? No… no beavers so far.

Brad: I wonder what happened to all the beavers? They must have been there to begin with.

Me: Hmm, you think? I haven’t heard anything about them…

Brad: There must have been a lot of them. Surprised you haven’t seen any.

Me: Well, maybe I will soon. I’ll let you know. 

Brad: I’d think there’d at least be signs of them.

Me: Yeah, they do usually leave signs—dams, chewed off trees, piles of sticks… Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention.

The conversation went on like that a good while, with Brad talking about beavers and me responding vaguely about not having seen any and not knowing what happened to the ones he believed at one time must have occupied my neighborhood. The puzzling thing about all of it was that my neighborhood didn’t seem conducive to beavers, since it wasn’t near any water. But Brad seemed certain.

As my husband and I drove away from the church, I was still pondering these things and also laughing a little about the idea of beavers hiding everywhere just out of sight among the houses, bushes and sidewalks in our neighborhood—maybe searching for some long lost lake the builders had heartlessly filled in. Just then we passed a neighborhood with a sign that said “Beaver Creek Preserve”. Finally it all made sense: Brad thought we’d moved to the “Beaver Creek Preserve”, when in fact we had moved to a neighborhood with a similar name, minus any mention of beavers. 

The lesson here is, if someone thinks you live in a beaver preserve, they’re more likely to ask you lots of questions about beavers. I learned that from Brad. 

~Amy