The Day After

The big wind came to our part of the world, did its damage and left. It was a strong wind and with all it's mite, it tried to blow us away. It huffed and it puffed, but all it could do was pull off shingles and wreaths and toss around garbage and garbage cans.  During the windy night, I could hear the race of the large containers used in our town for garbage, they are big and black. There are big blue ones too. They are used for containing recycling materials. The containers left their homes and searched for new places with the winds help. I could hear the rumbling of the cans as they went down the street. But, one big blue recycling can made it's way down the south side of our yard, bumping into the house along the way. I laid in bed and thought that since the garbage pickup had just occurred yesterday, it would only be an empty can that would need to be taken from our yard and up to a neighbor. But with morning light I realized that it was not a garbage can, but a recycling can and it had not been empty since the pick up for it will be next week. So needless to say there was more that just the can that needed to be removed from our back yard. It was windy all day, so I left it for later.

But then in the early evening, the doorbell rang and our next door neighbors stood on our porch with plastic bags telling me they had come to clean up our backyard. They had their three young children with them, all dressed warmly and ready to serve. They asked me to turn on lights in our backyard. Then they went to work. They even found two of the Christmas wreaths that had blown off the front of our house. How nice to have good neighbors.