Our dog is old and set in his ways. He gets up at 7:30 am every morning, even weekends. I go downstairs, let him out and feed him then usually go back to bed. Not for long, but maybe an hour if I’m lucky.

This morning I noted two amazon boxes, one small and one slightly larger stacked in a corner of the front porch. I was going to bring them in but if anyone opens the from door, the dog barks and I didn’t want to wake my wife and daughter.

I went back to bed and was able to sleep a bit more. At about 9am I came downstairs and made coffee, toast and read news, like I do every morning. When the girls came downstairs I told them that there were two amazon boxes outside. Except there wasn’t. Did somebody steal our packages? They were tucked away our of sight. The girls informed me that they weren’t waiting for anything from Amazon, but neither was I.

Perhaps I dreamed the whole thing. Perhaps it was yesterday and I was getting confused. Maybe with the pandemic and the election and all the other craziness I was really losing it. It seemed very real to me, but maybe it wasn’t. That worried me a bit more.

My wife and daughter decided to go for a walk, after giving me a bit of a hard time about my mysterious Amazon packages. On the way out my daughter said: maybe you should check your security camera.

A few years ago a critter had gotten into my small pond in the back yard and eaten my koi. I was curious about what sort of animal this was, because the koi was pretty large, maybe a foot long. I bought a cheap video surveillance camera (from Amazon) and set it up in the back yard to see if I could ID the culprit. I bought a second camera and set it up over the driveway, which is on the far side of the house and not very visible from the front door. It was an IP camera and you could easily view it from a phone or even the TV. Convenient, but mostly a toy.

Questioning my sanity a bit I started scrolling through saved video from the morning. I was pretty sure at this point I had Alzheimer’s starting up, when at 9am on the video I saw a white van in the driveway. A fellow got out and brought two boxes toward the front door and came back a few seconds later empty-handed, and drove off.

After a brief sense of relief that my mind might not be going, I wondered who was creeping around my neighborhood on a Saturday morning, in broad daylight, stealing packages. Except we weren’t expecting any packages. I felt confused again.

Maybe the delivery man realized he had gone to the wrong address and would return and pick up the packages for delivery to the correct address. Made sense. I looked further in the video, expecting to see the white van return. Instead I saw a man walk across the driveway. Shortly he returned with the boxes. It was my next door neighbor. I texted him.

Seems they were his boxes but Amazon had left them at my house. They had sent him a photo of the boxes as proof of delivery. He recognized the porch as ours and figured he would stop by and get them. When he saw they were still on the porch he scooped them up and went home, no harm done. They hadn’t been out there long.