Thank Goodness For Neighbors With Tractors!

My next door neighbor has a diesel powered John Deer tractor with a snow plow on it, and fortunately for the rest of us, he loves to use it. He plowed our entire subdivision yesterday. That's nearly a mile of gravel road. He'll even do residents driveways if they request it. Our homeowner's association has allocated funds for snow removal, so better that one of our own gets it, than hiring some contractor, who may not show up when needed. Keri Renault at Words That Trans-cend, knows what I'm talking about. She and her neighbors got tired of waiting for their contractor to show up and plow their street this weekend, so they all came out with snow shovels, and did it themselves! What great community spirit!

Unfortunately for my neighborhood, a mile of road is bit much to clear with snow shovels, even if everyone chipped in, so we are very fortunate indeed to have our neighbor with his tractor. He's a country boy, and a carpenter by trade. We are not on the same plane, intellectually, so we haven't connected as friends, but he's a good guy, with a good community ethic. He has pulled my fat out of the fire a couple of times. Our mailboxes are not located at our houses. As is the practice here with many rural subdivisions, all of our mailboxes are located out on the highway in front of our subdivision. As usual one day while coming home from work, I stopped at the mailboxes to pick up the day's mail, but this time I accidentally locked myself out of my truck. At the time I didn't keep a spare key on me, so I stood there locked out of my truck with the motor still running, wondering WTF am I going to do now! I couldn't even get into my house! This was before I owned a mobile phone, so the only thing I could think of doing was stopping by my next door neighbor, and asking them if I could use their phone to call someone who could unlock my truck. P wasn't home from work yet, but his wife, who's name also starts with P was. They were a young newly married couple at the time, and she was a real sweetheart. I apologized for dropping in on her unannounced, and told her that I locked my keys in my truck at the mailboxes, and needed to use her phone to call someone to come and unlock it for me. She said, "Oh, you don't need to do that. P has a slim jim, and he can unlock it for you as soon as he gets home." She then called him on her mobile phone, and as it turned out, he was on his way home about 7 miles away, and he had his slim jim with him in his truck. I thanked her, and walked the quarter mile back up the hill to the mailboxes to wait for him. Soon he showed up, and within minutes, he had slipped his slim jim down through the window seal, and pulled the lock lever up. A few years earlier, before I had a four wheel drive vehicle, we had another big snow storm and I was stranded in my drive way. I could not get my two wheel drive vehicle up the hill. He had a four wheel drive truck, and offered to take me down to the local country store to get provisions to get me through the next few days. What a mensch!

I didn't buy this place for the quality of the house. As far as houses go, its piece of shit. I bought it, because it was a beautiful 4.5 acres, with over 400ft. of pond frontage. The house itself is so chintzy, that it doesn't even have gutters, so all of the melt water drips of the roof to the deck below, creating a dangerous slippery sheet of ice underfoot, and menacing icicles dangling overhead at the roof's edge. They do look kind of Christmasy , but maybe I should wear my hardhat, when coming and going.

Melissa XX