Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Having Neighbors

The weatherman has been forecasting gloom and doom for the last 2 weeks. It's going to snow, no it's going to miss us, snow 4 to 6 inches, no ice only. Well it finally snowed, albeit 10 hours later than they said it would.
I watched my neighbors out snow-blowing their front driveway for a while. David, the son, bundled up like Nanook the Eskimo was pushing their blower around and occasionally dislodging chunks of ice with a stick. What I didn't see was this same David taking his snow-blower around the corner of our house to clear our driveway. My Mom tells me he's done this with every snow fall this year. She said she wishes she knew his phone number so she could call him and thank him. I think I'll make cookies instead. But it occurred to me how blessed we are to have these people in our lives. Nick and Phyllis are country folks right out of the Arkansas hills. They keep us company, share electricity in storms, they take my Mom out to lunch when I'm not around, they used to bring her lunch when she couldn't get out. They cut grass, shovel snow, dig up stumps. David has been known to show up and climb onto our roof to fix storm damage. He comes over when we gather for work like roofing the house. He doesn't ask for anything other than your company. How do you value something like that. The 3 of them truly are in the old fashioned sense, neighbors. Nick and David bailed me out of trouble when I was trying to repair the plumbing in this house. All I'd managed to do was poke a hole through a water pipe. It's hard to explain here but it's not about the things they do, despite my having listed some of them. But it's about who they are. What they believe in, how they live. I'm scatter brained, we all know that, I wish I had a way to tell them how much we appreciate them. In the way of neighbors, they are the KaChing in our live. We hit the jackpot.