Police reports can delight

When my husband and I moved to Bella Vista 14 years ago, we were enchanted by the smalltown atmosphere and we enjoyed the fact that our neighbors immediately made us feel like family. One of the first things we did to begin familiarizing ourselves with the area was to subscribe to The Weekly Vista.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to read the Bella Vista Police Reports and discover that the most troubling accounts involved stray cattle or missing goats, strange-acting raccoons or snakes cornered in garages. I even went so far as to clip one particularly funny account about a bull stubbornly blocking the road and sent it to my son so he could see what a great place we had moved to. Sadly, this has changed over the years, and not for the better.

It seems the rest of the world has caught up to us. Nowadays, the majority of the reports involve drugs, DWIs and assaults. Last week was a refreshing exception.

I can’t tell you how much I laughed when I read the report of someone who found a suspicious “weed” in her backyard. It turned out to be just a regular weed, not the smokeable kind, but it must have given the officers a good chuckle when they were able to reassure the caller that the neighborhood was not a drug-growing haven.

I wish we could read more reports like this. I’d rather laugh about cows and raccoons than worry about drugs and drunk drivers. Kathy Zumbro Bella Vista