February 19, 2004
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Good Neighbors
Last October, my mailbox, which has been standing for over fifty years, started to wobble. I was going to have Derek replace it while he was here in November, but Delia insisted that she wanted to look into an alternative to the replacement I had in mind, a plastic kit available at the local Walmart. While Derek was here, no mention was made of the project.
The condition of the box continued to deteriorate. It went from a simple wobble to having to lean on one of the boxes on either side for support. Delia still insisted she was going to take care of it. She did look at the boxes available at Walmart but indicated, vaguely, that she also wanted to look elsewhere.
The woman across the street is a widow, living on the remains of her husband's phone company retirement. She was living there when we built our house and she has a daughter just slightly older than me. The neighbors help her out a lot. The fence in front of her house needed some repairs, so my next-door neighbor replaced the defective wooden posts and cross-members, staining them to match the rest of the fence. Then he pulled out my mailbox, dug a new hole, re-seated the mailbox in the new hole and painted the post.
It looks like it'll hold up for another fifty years, unlike me.
It's nice to have neighbors who do good things without being asked.
Comments (4)
That is remarkable in Southern California. It wouldn't be so much in other parts of the country in which I've lived, but this is the first time I've ever heard of such a thing here. Very cool.
That kind of thing is great. Restores one's faith in various things. I'm glad that you didn't have to go with a plastic Walmart mailbox. I have contradictory desires for my future home -- I want it to be on a large piece of land so that we'll have privacy, and yet I don't want to deprive the kids of neighbours. Not sure how it'll work out. But considering that there are no kids yet, or money for land or a house or even rent, I'd say I have plenty of time to ponder it
Take care
-J-
wow...procrastination paid off!
~Spot~
We don't have that kind of neighbourliness around here. When I lived in England, my mother and I would always buy flowers for any new neighbours, to welcome them to the area - when I arrived, I wasn't even welcomed by the neighbourhood...just talked about, I guess. (It is a very closed neighbourhood here - kind of like a small country district.)