Monday, April 8, 2013

G -- The Garden Girls

For the first time since I was a toddler, my next door neighbor is a friend of mine. In the intervening
years neighbors mostly seemed to be people who couldn't understand why I didn't want to listen to their music at three in the morning or their loud domestic squabbles in the night.

My current neighbor is a dear and embodies the term neighbor very nicely. We are both writers, which gives us a lot in common, but our bonding has really occurred over gardening. Each spring, after a winter spent indoors and communicating largely by email and Facebook, we renew our friendship as be clean our yards, plant our gardens, and trade seeds.

This is made much easier by the fact that we live in a mobile home park and are therefore very close in proximity with one another unless I am working out in the "north 40," as I call the far northern end of my estate.

While digging and weeding we catch up on family.  We stop and chat with the members of our mobile home community as they walk by. Most of them are also avid, if not rabid, gardeners themselves. Many of our relationships have been built around gardening and urban farming.

As the season progresses we will trade watering when out of town and share food as harvest time comes along. My raspberry patch produces far more than I can eat myself, so I happily share them with my neighbor.

We even chase the deer out of each others' garden. If that's not neighborliness and friendship, I don't know what is.

6 comments:

  1. Good to see your G posting. Hope you can keep up with the A to Z Challenge.

    Lee
    Blogging from A to Z
    Twitter: @AprilA2Z
    #atozchallenge

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  2. Wonderful idea for a blog! New follower here. I'm stopping by from the "A to Z" challenge and I look forward to visiting again.

    Sylvia
    http://www.writinginwonderland.blogspot.com/

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  3. This is so sweet. It's nice to read about friendly neighbours. Nowadays, it's all too easy to live beside someone for years and have no idea who they are.

    Have fun with a-z. :)

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