The Role of Neighbors

As you're aware, we have just recently returned from a nine-day evacuation and returned to our home and our neighbors.  We fled the wrath of Hurricane Florence, which turned out to be a wise journey given the extended power outage, flooded roads and winds that stripped siding, fascia boards and soffits from houses in our community and on our street.

Our "street" is actually a semicircle that has about 18 houses on it, none more than a couple years old, some very new and more being built as we speak.  Given our location on the Carolinas coast, they are built to withstand Category 3 hurricane-force winds.

As new neighbors join the community as their houses are completed, those already here aggressively welcome them into the community that our street has become.  We need each other, I think we all agree, and so we make sure that we talk a lot and interact a lot.  The first Thursday of each month is "drinks in the driveway", where we get together in a common area at 6pm with drinks in hand and lawn chairs, to catch up.

We still don't really "know" each other as well as we ultimately will.  Certain couples -- most on the street are in our 60s -- have tended to pair up with another couple or three, as they discover particularly compatible personalities.

So it was not a surprise that one resident of the street, who lives two doors down, returned after only 3-4 days; we knew him to be one who would prefer to be addressing issues sooner and directly, even in the absence of electricity and a boil-your-water order that still has not been lifted.

After the storm left, but before anyone else had returned, our neighbor had walked around to take note of the damage to other houses -- some siding, some other minor damages.  We, for example, had a soffit piece come apart near the peak of our roof, and some separation in some wood joints, but that was it.

Our neighbor contacted a contractor right away.  Knowing that contractor vehicles would be banned from our community for a while for new construction but not for repairs, he arranged for a contractor to assign one of his crews to start fixing houses on our street as soon as the residents started coming back.

We returned last Thursday night, were given the contact information for the contractor's repair team, and by noon on Saturday our repairs were all done.  Completed, and for a very low price.

What is a neighbor?  I mean, the word just springs from some ancient English words for "inhabit" and "near", but on this street it means a little more.  Because of our neighbor, over half of the houses on the street, all of which sustained at least some damage, had their repairs completed before the weekend was out, with good work at a very good price.

I know I won't forget what our neighbor arranged, because the alternative would have been a mad scramble a week later to get someone to help.

Back in the winter of 1999, we had just moved into our neighborhood where we would be for 17 more years.  When the first snowstorm came, dropping a foot of snow on the neighborhood, I took out my snowblower and started clearing everyone's driveways, most of whom we had not met yet.

As I told my best girl at the time, if you want good neighbors, be a good neighbor first.  Not one neighbor I plowed out ever thanked me, but that's mostly because none of them knew who had done it.  But for as long as we were there, there were no issues with interactions with the community.

I think we're in one of those places now.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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