Saturday, July 23, 2011

The kindness of strangers

Mom's home from the hospital as of a few days ago, although "home" right now is her sister's house. I'm staying in my cousin's room (and I love love love her bathroom, which is like my favorite room in the whole wonderful house--when I grow up and have my own house, its bathroom will be like that one). Mom's doing much better; we even went out to see the new Harry Potter movie the other day, which she loved. We'll probably see it again next week.

My aunt's house is across town from ours, which sounds like a long drive except that we live in such a tiny village. It takes me about three minutes to get from one house to another. This afternoon Mom settled down for a nap and I ran home to get some stuff and attempt to tame some of the yard. I haven't had a chance to mow in almost a month, much less weed the garden.

Well, when I pulled into our driveway I was shocked to see that the lawn was newly shorn. And when I parked in back, I saw the neighbor across the street on his big riding mower, finishing up. I'd never even met him, but he said he was a good friend of another of my cousins when they were young, and he was out mowing his yard and said he decided to get ours at the same time.

There's been so much kindness shown to Mom and me over the last few weeks, it's overwhelming. Mom keeps exclaiming over the unbelievable number of cards she's received, all the flowers and notes and emails from people wishing her well. I told her that if only we could harness all the goodwill, we could probably solve the energy crisis for good. Clean goodwill energy for all!

I wonder if I can persuade someone to weed my garden for me.

6 comments:

Fox Lee said...

Weeds suck : P Ying and I have pretty much given up on them until Fall.

Alan W. Davidson said...

I hear you (and Natalie) on the weed situation. We haven't touched our garden this year...

That was nice of the unknown neighbour to cut the lawn. If you were to leave a list of home repairs tacked to the front door...

Danielle Birch said...

Glad to hear your mum is home. And it's good to hear there is kindness out there among the neighbours.

K.C. Shaw said...

Natalie--I visited my garden for the first time today and it's...well, it would be AWESOME if I wanted to grow waist-high grass.

Alan--A brilliant idea. Maybe it will work. :)

Danielle--It definitely makes me feel better about my fellow human beings. I tend to be too cynical.

Cate Gardner said...

Oh, what a wonderful thing for him to do. Makes me fell quite teary.

K.C. Shaw said...

It sure saved me a lot lot lot of work. Our lawn isn't small. I've been telling all our other neighbors how nice he was.