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Good Neighbors
Life is good……and life is better with good neighbors. I live in a small lakeside community in East TN and am lucky to have a retired couple beside me who bring a lot of blessings to my life. We chat at the fence often when I’m home, are happy to give each other a hand with maintenance/mowing etc and to my great fortune they have a huge garden and are constantly bringing me over all kinds of good things from that. We recently have had a lot of rain and severe thunderstorms in the area resulting in a lot of trees/limbs down. After hours of sawing and burning I had things basically down to a big pine down on one side of the property and a large maple that was uprooted in front of the house. We had been waiting for a dry couple of days to deal with the maple so Steve could help drag parts of it around with his tractor without destroying the yard. Well…..I came home yesterday a little early to work on it and almost the ENTIRE tree was cut up and limbs hauled off and burned even though I told him I would get it. That’s the way he is… then he apologizes and hopes I’m not mad about it. lol Nothing to do but bring down my log splitter and saw to get it split and put in the barn as well as haul other piles of wood we have stacked around. After a couple hours I see Steve coming over carrying something. His wife Phyllis thought I probably needed dinner so she fixed me a plate. Good country cooking with corn, green beans, cabbage, fresh tomoato slices and a slice of bacon. That meant break time so I grabbed a glass of water and enjoyed dinner on the front deck. It got me to thinking how lucky I am and how determined I am to pay back their kindness at any and every opportunity.
There are good people everywhere in my experience but my neighbors are some of the best. I am grateful for them. Life is good.
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Good neighbors are wonderful! We are blessed, too!
We are moving next week and hope for as good a neighbors as we have now.
The only difference between a good neighborhood and a bad neighborhood is the neighbors.
Love your story – you picked a good spot and a good state!
Reminded me of this:
We just left Cali and for the most part we were blessed with good neighbors. The one immediately north wasn’t a bad neighbor, while she regularly asked for help, in turn she never complained about my rowdy kids.
On our last day, JY and I were on the porch (nowhere else to sit) enjoying a beer and a last view. She exited her home and got in her car without even a nod.
”That’s okay Debby. It’s only been 36 years. No need to say good bye”, I muttered under my breath.
JY burst out laughing and said he’d have been disappointed if her behavior on our last day had been different than the thousands of days previous.
Very cool
Hahahaha there is something to be said for consistency
I do have a favorite story I never tire of telling. In 1991 we got hit with the Sierra Madre earthquake; the epicenter was just a few miles from us.
I was home alone with a 2-1/2 year old and a three month old. Fortunately, both were in bed with me. When everything started to shake I just pulled the comforter over our heads.
The breaking of glass and rattling seemed to last forever. When it finally calmed down, my glasses were not to be found (as usual). Even if I had had shoes under the bed (a recommendation) I wouldn’t have been able to find them.
I stayed in bed wondering what in the hell I was going to do, when I heard the voice of my neighbor to the south, Richard.
He had climbed in through one of our many broken windows. He grabbed the kids and put them in their car seats in the car, then came back for me. Found my glasses, found me a pair of shoes. Then checked for gas leaks, etc.
We stayed in the front yard for most of the day, he got us MacDonalds and then later helped me clean up the broken glass.
Though not much older than JY and I, he passed years ago in an assisted living facility (years of alcoholism. He was the kindest, happiest drunk I’ve ever known)
I have been paying back his kindnesses to friends, neighbors and family since.
Richard, may his memory be a blessing.
A good fence.
In our urban environment, we have the best neighbors one could ask for (kind, caring, helpful, watchful, friendly, and so forth). The house to our immediate north sold about 4 years ago to a young couple. After they’d lived there for a bit, I told another neighbor that ‘we won the new neighbor lottery.’
where are you all headed?
We’re in southern UTah for about a year while JY helps my brother with a production project.
Then onto College Station TX. We bought a house (over the phone) two doors from our daughter.
Ahh one of those California buyers purchasing property sight unseen! Well you daughter is there so should be fine :) Since you are on Ricochet I don’t have to tell you to leave your politics in Cali either!
My daughter heard they might be selling and promptly knocked on their door. Met the owners, negotiated most of the deal and took a video for me. (I have since visited and the house is perfect)
She has her brother and sister in law and niece and nephew across the street (with a suite for her mother and father in law), now us two doors away.
A realtor contacted her directly about a house coming in the market and said: who you got for me? She’s trying to talk a brother into it.
And no worries about Cali politics; that’s the reason we all left.
I’m trying to get my youngest brother, who’s still in Oregon, to finally make the jump and come to where I am now. It’s partly his own fault for having rented his whole adult life so now he has no equity, but the bottom line is he can’t afford a house in Oregon. Pretty much anywhere in Oregon, from the sound of it.
When I came here, it was a blind jump from Phoenix. I couldn’t even afford to make a trip to look at the place, but the owners/sellers seemed like decent people – although I never actually met them in person either – and it has turned out well. I needed more floor space, my townhome in Phoenix was only 1,000 sq ft and now I have 4,500. And it didn’t matter where I moved to, my income doesn’t depend on location.
But now that I’m here, my brother has options that I didn’t. Including that he can buy a place here and I’ll keep an eye on it until he’s ready to move. Which, so far, he’s planning to stay in Oregon as long as our mother – who turned 90 in May – is alive.
Our sister and her husband left Oregon about two years ago now, they sold their 20-year-old house for about $400k and bought a brand new bigger house on more land in Tennessee for $330k. (Cookeville actually, but I know they wouldn’t have been interested in the meet-up.)
One of our uncles who passed just after our sister moved to TN, had a little house in Salem, about 700 sq ft, that needed a lot of work. My brother was thinking he might try to buy it for maybe $150k and then have to do maybe another $100k of work. Then it actually sold as-is for $285k, just 4 days after listing, and slightly ABOVE what had been the initial asking price. That was pretty much the last nail in the coffin for my brother thinking about buying anything in Oregon.
And, I think even if he had bought it and fixed it up, he would have been bitching about it for the rest of his life. (My brother is the type that if he was offered a brand new Ferrari for free, but it had a flat tire, he’d refuse because it was a piece of sh!t and nobody should pay $1 for it…)
Meanwhile, a few blocks from my place is a house pretty similar to our uncle’s, but somewhat larger – just over 800 sq ft I think – with a detached garage, also needing some work but not as much as the uncle’s house did, and the owner has been asking $27k for it.
I hope my brother gets motivated soon, before someone else takes it.
For the most part (semi-rural north central Texas), our neighbors who have moved from California have been clear that they are refugees, not missionaries.
The voting problem in Texas (as has happened in other states before) is the third or fourth generation children of the locals. As a region gets wealthy, the grandchildren who did not see first hand how that wealth came into being assume that wealth is unlimited, will never be diminished, and can be frittered away without consequence.
When Mrs. Tabby and I emptied out and then sold the house Mrs. Tabby’s parents had lived in for the final 34 years of their lives, it took us forever to participate in the farewells with the neighbors. Many of the neighbors had been there for much if not all of that 34 years (moving in when the neighborhood was brand new). Most of the neighbors 34 years ago were young families in need of help with their new houses. Mrs. Tabby’s dad had been the experienced neighborhood “go to” handyman that the neighbors all consulted. Then, 34 years later, the neighbors were experienced, and Mrs. Tabby’s parents were the elderly and frail people who needed help. Now that they were gone, and we sold the house to a young family, it was time to further turn the tables and allow the neighbors to be the experienced handymen to help the new family as they remade the house for a new generation.
Ah, yes.
And that it’s somehow appropriate for them to redistribute the wealth of others too.
This is so true. About 80% of the people I meet in my part of AZ are CA refugees, mostly conservative politically.
I’m having my house re-roofed and one of the vendors was telling me about a well-known local ranching family. The current generation has sold off much of the ranch land. They fly in and out to do business, but otherwise have little in the way of ties to the area, the way their parents and grandparents did. They all went to good universities and and at least one is an attorney. Roofer dude, who has had dealings with them, says they absolutely remind him of the Duttons from Yellowstone.
That same system of storms hit us a little bit of time before it got to the other end of the state. Neighbors across from us texted and asked if we had camera footage of the two trees on their property that snapped in half. The neighbor to our right talked to my wife while I was at work and offered to help put back up a section of fence that blew over between our property and his (and joked about the “horse” [that’s our not even fat 110lb Silver Lab] that played in his yard. We don’t interact that much on the regular but watch out for each other. Good people are usually just a property line away.
Note: One of the two trees that came down at my opposite neighbor was hollow and apparently hosted a bee hive. He’s been trying for about a week to get some of the honeycomb in there. By his estimate there’s probably about 40lbs of it. He, myself , and the other neighbor spent a good 20 minutes standing in the road trying to figure out how to get at it without going to the hospital from bee stings. Plans are still ongoing…