Love Your Neighbor

This is my neighbor, we’ll call him… Fred. It’s a good neighbor kind of name and the new Mister Rogers movie is coming out in a hot minute. Just FYI… he would “harm my person” if he knew I was posting this. I hid behind my curtain on a step stool to get this picture WITHOUT his face in it.

Seriously though, he and his family are the BEST neighbors I could ask for and I’ve I’ll already told them if they ever decide to move, they must give me ample notice so I can try to bribe their new neighbor into selling me their house to which his wife replied, “it’s settled, if we move, we move as a group”. I think I may have cheered a bit on the inside.

Let me tell you a little about Fred. When I brought the first load of goods to move in my house, it was a clear and beautiful day, until it wasn’t. Halfway here, it started to blizzard outside. Blizzard, as in, slow down to 25 miles an hour because you can’t see a thing. I was a little nervous that my belongings were getting soaked in the back of my Uncle’s truck. We got everything in the house quickly and decided that we would saving moving for another day.

My new neighbor came over to introduce himself and asked if I would like him to move his family’s cars out of the driveway so I had enough room. I’ll insert here that we share a driveway, a narrow driveway. I’d never thought about having neighbors so close to me or how that could be a positive or negative experience. But he seemed friendly enough.

That evening as it kept snowing, I realized I was a new homeowner that didn’t own a shovel and I panicked a little. Until I heard him outside shoveling my snow. Ok, I thought, this neighbor thing isn’t so bad after all. Would you believe that 4 years later, he still takes care of the snow for me?!? Driveway, sidewalk, porch, all of it. I mean, I am spoiled. I secretly think he does both sides of the driveway so my car doesn’t hit ice and just happen to slide over into one of his. But in passing once, he mentioned that he did this for the previous owner of my home as well.

In the summer, he mows my yard. In the fall, he mulches up the leaves and he’s been known to put them in my garden for me. Honestly, I still pinch myself every time I hear the lawnmower or snowblower fire up and I always tell him that just because he’s been doing these things for this long does not mean it is expected and anytime he wants to stop, I won’t be offended. Well, this fall he asked if he could trim my tree (pictured above). Clearly, he knows I don’t have the tools for this and I might poke my eye out with a falling branch.

What do I do? Say thank you. Profusely. And he tells me it’s no problem because he enjoys it. And I say, THANK GOD! He won’t let me pay him so I buy him gift cards or champagne for their anniversary or whatever creative thing I can think of that he won’t reject. And of course I bake for him.

What’s the point of all this bragging about having the best neighbor anyway? Fred has lived in his home for over 20 years and he has done this for everyone that has lived in my house for all of those years. He doesn’t do this because it’s me, I just got lucky enough to move in next to the guy that knows how to love his neighbors… the person next to him.