And Like a Good Neighbor, He Cut the Grass for Me

I should have posted this back in the summertime, when this happened ...

I was cutting the grass one night.  It was a Saturday night, and by night I mean it was after 7:00 PM or so.  Nobody in their right mind in Augusta cuts grass in the heat of the day.  I had just finished my own yard and had started on the yard next door because the lady there was on vacation.  Our yard man normally takes care of this chore for us, for a small fee, but we hadn't seen him in over two weeks.  Judging from the thickness of the grass, maybe it had been more than three weeks.

I had just got a good start on the neighbors yard when a stranger walked by the house and nodded a greeting.  I acknowledged it but kept right on mowing--or trying to.  The grass was so tall and thick that I could only advance the mower a foot or so with each thrust in some places.  By the time I reached the edge of the yard I saw out of the corner of my eye the "stranger," who is actually a new neighbor on the street, riding through his own yard on his mower.  My first thought was that he was showing off, that he had a riding mower and I only had push one.

Then I thought of New York.

I lived for a time in Johnstown, New York, on a nice street with nice enough neighbors.  Except when it snowed.  In the winter, after a snowfall, the driveways in New York have to be shoveled off.  So the first thought I had of my Georgia neighbor zipping across his yard on a riding mower was of my New York neighbors with their snow blowers, blowing two feet of snow off their driveways in a few minutes while I spent four hours doing the same thing to mine with a dented shovel.  The memory set me in a bad twist toward my new neighbor, two houses down.

Then a funny thing happened.  My Georgia neighbor motored right on through his own yard and into the street, then up into the neighbor lady's yard whose grass I was trying to cut, and asked me, "Do you need some help."

My normal reserve broke down at that point.  What a relief!  I had fun bagging up the clippings while my new neighbor cut the neighbor lady's grass for me.
                                                              ________________


Afterword:  I can think of at least one occasion when it would have been nice if one of my New York neighbors had done something like that for me.