Neighbors

I stood with my mouth open as the garage door opened. 18 inches of snow and NO snow day. Instead of enjoying my 2-hour delay sleeping in and having a leisurely breakfast, I stood in my boots at 6:30 and grabbed my shovel.

My husband and I began slowly uncovering the driveway. After about an hour, I noticed some of the neighbors began to move about. I could hear the rumble of a snow blower taunting us. Finally we reached the edge of the driveway where the snow from the plow reached my chest. The neighbor from across the street came out of his house and was walking toward us. I assumed he was going to offer his sympathy that we were the only neighbors that had to shovel or maybe give a friendly warning to be kind to our backs. He reached in his pocket for something and I thought it would be the business card for the person who plows his driveway. Boy was I wrong. Instead he took out his flip phone and took a picture of me behind the giant snow bank. He laughed and said, “we should exchange emails someday so I can send this to you. Winter in Maine ha!” Then he chuckled some more and walked away.

“Um that was weird,” My husband said.

I was speechless. I shrugged.

We continued shoveling for another 20 minutes when we heard our other neighbor start up his John Deere tractor with a snow blower attachment on the front. I really can’t believe we didn’t buy a snow blower I thought. Just then I saw him backing up the tractor down the street. He was coming toward us. He stopped at the end of our driveway and gave us a wave, a smile, and a thumbs up! We were saved! He easily finished the last 1/3 of our driveway in about 5 minutes.

Thank goodness for neighbors… well at least the helpful ones.