I complain about living in a tiny house, but our tiny house is in a great neighborhood. Our church group is awesome and our neighbors are even awesomer.
We live right next door to a little old lady and her older, single daughter. We try to help her with her yard and shoveling snow in the winter and she's always so cute when she calls us to say thank you. Jason helped her prune her trees last week and she comes over a few days later with a whole bag of strawberry shortcake fixins' for us as thanks. (We never look for thank you's, but I'm not complaining about strawberry shortcake!) She doesn't have a sprinkler system so we see her outside all the time during the summer watering her yard and sweeping sweeping sweeping her driveway. She loves Troy and is always up for a short conversation.
On our other side is an older couple. They work at the Museum of Idaho part-time and we see the husband outside all the time as well. He's kind of a quirky guy but I have never had a neighbor so willing to give of his time and resources for us. I would say that he does some little act of service for us most days. When they first moved in last year he told us he had every tool imaginable and that we were welcome to them should we ever need to borrow. Since then he's snowblowed our driveway, edged our lawn, helped us winterize our sprinklers, and helped stabilize our fence (which is due to blow away any day now). While he was looking at the fence he noticed that the latch on our gate is broken/missing and decided to also fix that for us. I had a recent breakthrough with his wife that I was so excited about. Whenever I see her I try to wave and say hello, but she never responds. I don't know if she's self-conscience about her weight or what... A few weeks ago she, out of the blue, came over and told us Troy was welcome to pick flowers out of their yard. Since then she's initiated hellos and short conversations a few times. Hooray!!
We have another little old lady across the street that loves the rhubarb out of our backyard. I took her over a huge bag a few weeks ago (we're not big rhubarb fans) and she was so excited. It looks like I'll be transplanting some of my plant into her backyard later this summer when I dig mine out. She likes to come across the street and chat while we're outside. She has this cute little shitzu dog that Troy likes to pet.
We have a few neighbors that haven't been interested in being too friendly. To each his own, right?
I just think back to our apartment-dwelling days and how miserable it was sharing walls with other families, some of whom were NOT pleasant. I could go on for an hour about horrible experiences we had with neighbors, but that's for another post. I'm just glad we don't have to deal with that crap anymore; instead we get to make friends and be happy in our little spot.
