Small Town Life Here’s what I love about living in a small town. My block has about six houses on each side of the street. Ed is my neighbor across the street. He’s an older gent, and he was in flooring for his working life. When I first moved in, Ed brought me a trivet he’d made from leftover flooring samples … it’s perfect to go under my rice cooker. Well, Ed owns a snow blower, and it snowed last night, about a foot and a half. Now Mike lives on my side of the block, two houses down from me. He’s my hippie housepainter neighbor, and the first person I met here. When the weather is nice, Mike sits on his front porch in the morning drinking coffee, noodling around on his guitar and saying hello to people. For the first week or so that I was here, Mike and the guy at the hardware store were just about the only people I spoke to all day long.

Here’s how the neighborhood works when there’s snow. Ed snowblows the sidewalk on his side of the street, and then hands the snowblower off to Mike, who does our side of the street. While Mike was snowblowing over here, I looked out the window and there was Ed, shoveling the steps for his next door neighbor, Minnie. Well, actually it looked like he was expending as much energy convincing Minnie, who broke her hip last year, not to shovel her own steps as he was in getting this little chore done for her. We worry about Minnie, she’s gettiing quite frail, but there she was in her little pink parka and a stocking cap, with her shovel in one hand, ready to take on her front steps. And there was Ed, who is no spring chicken himself, chatting her up to keep her safely on her own top step while he cleared the snow to the street for her. It’s a nice way to wake up in the morning, watching Ed and Mike taking care of our little block. .