Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, Al style

We've not been using the back door lately. A Robin has nested above the porch light, which has conveniently blown out, and she flies to a nearby branch and scolds us terribly whenever we open the door. So today when Al, my next door neighbor drove by on the way to his house, I peeled out the front door to catch him. I dashed up the drive and caught him just as he was going into his back door.

I needed a ladder, and Al has everything. Now we have always known that Al and Joann are the best neighbors on the planet, but this year we are discovering just how "best" they really are. Our property is surrounded on three sides by myrtle, not grass, because of our being gone. The rear of our house is trees, trees, and more trees, which, while beautiful, do tend to make fall leaf raking somewhat of a challenge. Tim bought a blower for the leaves, and diligently blew them into piles all fall. But getting rid of leaves from several acres of trees whose leaves blow onto the yard is like moving the Sahara a teaspoon at a time, if you catch my drift (excuse the pun). One day I commented to Al, "Oh well, we can't seem to keep up. I guess all these years when we were in Berlin and the leaves just got left, they didn't hurt the myrtle any." "Uh, well," Al said quietly. "Um, I just kind-of took care of the leaves."

Winter came, and Al took care of the snow, too. We would be out shoveling our porch, feeling quite noble at working up a sweat, when Al would come by with his little plow, taking care of our driveway in addition to his. He uses our driveway, but he doesn't use our parking area, and of course Al plowed that, too.

Now spring is here, and I trotted over to Al to get a ladder. You see, now we have tent caterpillars in our crabapple tree, which mar the beauty of the vivid pink blossoms somewhat, and bugged me every time I looked out the window while writing this blog. I got rid of the lower ones with a broom, but there was one huge ugly mass high up in the tree. My broom didn't reach.

"What kind of ladder do you want?" Al asked. "Oh, a big one," I answered. "I want to lop off a branch of the crabapple tree to save it from the tent caterpillars. We tried climbing the tree, but it's too high up." Al grinned. I'm sure by now his Berlin citified neighbors are a source of great amusement at dinnertime. Now they are scaling trees to get rid of tent caterpillars. Al produced the perfect telescoping branch lopper-offer and tried to explain to me how to use it. I got bold. "Do you have a minute, Al, and could you just demonstrate that on that branch?" "Sure," Al said.

I watched Al at work. "They really like this tree," commented Al. "Oh, they've been here in the past?" I wondered. "Yea, but I usually get rid of them," said Al nonchalantly as he lopped off the offending branch and told me to burn the critters in the burn barrel. I took the chance to ask Al about some glop I needed to put on a couple of places on the tree where I'd had our other neighbor trim it with his chain saw. "Oh, I've got that," Al offered. He dropped it off on his way out to the golf course.

I stood there, burning caterpillars, thinking, how many other nice things is Al doing for me year after year, without me noticing, never wanting thanks or repayment (kind-of hard to thank someone when you don't even know about it and are halfway across the world). Next time I do something nice for someone and they don't know about it, I think I'll say to myself, "That's for Al."