You just never know....

We went out to dinner with D and "I", our immediate neighbors just north of us. They are the nicest people one could ever hope to have as neighbors and they have lived in the neighborhood since our homes were in the building stage. They are a wealth of information.

As we sat at the table I asked her if she had an update on another one of our neighbors whose son is having severe seizures. In fact, he almost died about 2 weeks ago. He was in Intensive Care for over a week. (He is doing better but they still don't know what is causing his seizures and they are still not being controlled.) Sitting there chatting "I" drops a bombshell. The young man's mother was in a polygamous marriage for a number of years. She and her husband (now) have been married about 15 years. You just never know the difficult stories of the people who live around you. She lived in such fear when she left him (the polygamous husband) because he threatened to kill her. Her mother and a friend drove a truck up when her husband was gone and they loaded anything she could take with her in the truck and then left with her and her four children. The two oldest children couldn't survive outside of the 'compound' so they went back to live with their father. They did come (and still do) to visit her fairly frequently. I don't know what the circumstances were to lead her into a polygamous relationship at 16 years old, especially against her parents wishes. What a sad, sad life!