A while back my husband and I moved to a new town. We chose a house in an older neighborhood thinking it would be a perfect fit for us. While looking at the house we spoke to Nick, the man living across the street. He assured us that it was a pretty good place to live. We moved in mid-Spring and hoped we had made the right decision.

A few days after we moved in, my husband and son were hooking up the washing machine. One of the fittings on the faucet would not unthread and so it had to be replaced. My husband had not unpacked all of his tools and asked me to go next door and see if the neighbor had the one he needed. I meet Justin for the first time. He was younger, had tattoos on both arms and seemed pretty nice. He got the tool we needed and asked to look at the problem. He proceeded to fix the faucet including doing an indoor weld on the pipe, which is not an easy job. We were so impressed with his kindness.

Summer came and my husband decided to put in a garden. He was hauling dirt into the backyard when Brett, another neighbor, decided that he and his daughter would help him. They helped haul all of the topsoil into the garden area. They made an all-afternoon job into one that took about forty-five minutes. I couldn’t bake them a batch of cookies fast enough.

Winter came and it was a bad one. We had snow continuously day after day. In the mornings the men in the neighborhood would get up early and come out to shovel the snow. They shoveled their own driveways and also those of the elderly and disabled. Again my heart was touched by the kindness I saw.

My neighborhood is made up of a diverse group of people. They are diverse in age, ethnicity, race and religion; they are truly a heterogeneous mixture. There is one trait that they all seem to have in common though: they are caring decent people. They are not our friends in the traditional sense, i.e. in the Fall we don’t hang out at each other’s houses and watch football games and have barbeques. But we are all united by a desire to care for each other and help each other as needed.

Nick was right; it is a pretty good place to live here on the corner of Unity and Diversity.