Good Neighbors

Our last trip to Young's Park for Tuesday Nite Live was so fun that we decided to do it again tonight. We had Chuck and Reba and their kids over for supper (bratwursts and hotdogs on the grill, raw veggies, pasta salad, cookie salad [courtesy of Reba], and chips), and then we all hiked over to the bandshell in the park on the hill overlooking the city. It was a cool, breezy evening, so we dressed warmly, and Susan brought fruit snacks and cookies (made by our daughters today) to enjoy while seated on our quilt and listening to Cotton Wood, a ND bluegrass band. They were good and interacted well with the audience between numbers. Still, they mostly served as background music for us while we adults visited and the children found other kids and played tag and hide-and-seek and gave piggyback rides until it was time to walk home.

Cotton Wood on stage

Our next-door neighbors John and Beth's daughter joined us for supper and the concert, too, and she hung around to play with our kids on the lawn in the dark after we got home from the concert. While we remained outside playing, Chuck and Reba took their little boy to Beth to have her look him over; he had fallen and hurt his clavicle in the afternoon and continued to complain of pain throughout the night, and they wanted a nurse's assessment of the situation. (She gave him a clean bill of health.)

Jack ready for the ride home from the concert

I continue to be impressed with how neighborly the people in this neighborhood are. Even our next-door neighbor Ivella waved broadly to us from the couch in her living room as our gang tramped past their (Ivella and Leo's) house. In our previous neighborhood--with few exceptions (like our wonderful next-door neighbors there, Bob and Judy)--people stayed in their houses and kept their curtains drawn and their eyes averted: no waving at passersby, no dining at one another's houses, no going to community events together, no sending your kids with the neighbors to a concert, no watering your neighbor's lawn or examining a neighbor kid's bruised shoulder, no offering to fix your neighbor's lawn sprinkler (thank you, Chuck), no snowblowing the neighbor's driveway * (thank you, Neal), no bringing over fresh baking the day after the neighbors move in (thank you, Ivella), no popping over to help a neighbor start a stubborn garden tiller (thank you, Leo), no supplying popsicles to the neighborhood children (thank you, Roger and Audrey), no stopping to visit anytime you're out and about and see the neighbors out, too (thank you, pretty much anybody in Dickinson), etc.

This is a good place to live.

* "No snowblowing the neighbor's driveway" is really just a way to thank Neal; it's not really true of our previous neighborhood, where Bob quite often snowblew our driveway while he was out cleaning off his own. Bob and Judy really were great neighbors.