Community Lives

Today we had strong winds from a noreaster that passed through Charlotte over the weekend. The winds were tropical storm strength, 30 to 40 mph. It was predictable that some more Bradford Pears in my neighborhood would break under the force of the winds, and sure enough, when I came home at lunch time, I saw that my next door neighbor’s tree (among others) was down.

The inspiring thing is how when I came home after work, I knew my neighbors would already be pitching in to help cut up the fallen limbs into the regulation size for the city to collect. My husband and I joined the other two neighbors and the homeowner hard at work. When our neighbor George came home, he joined in too. When the wife of one of the helpers got home, she joined in too.

The little boys from next door, who were helping a little too, called our work a “party.” I really need to teach them better English.

Though there are many other ways I can think of to spend a couple of hours that are more enjoyable, I derive a great deal of pleasure in knowing that community is not dead, that neighbors still rearrange their plans to help someone in need, that some of the values of yesteryear where community was strong, are not completely dead in our “me” generation.

Perhaps I was most inspired by my own behavior, that I avoided doing the tempting thing, pretending I didn’t know about the fallen tree, going out to dinner, and getting home late, after all the work had been done.

This entry was posted on April 16, 2007 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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