Lori borrowing a cup of sugar was such a quintessentially neighborly moment that I convinced her to let me take a picture!
"Hey neighbor, can I borrow a cup of sugar?" Lori asked yesterday afternoon when she showed up on the doorstep of our tiny house. She wasn't kidding either. She was in the middle of baking gingersnap cookies for an open house we hosted for our neighbors yesterday evening and had just run out of sugar. "It's sure nice to be able to do this!" she said as she transferred sugar from my mason jar to hers and I agreed.
One of the things I learned when I went to one of Dee Williams' workshops (and which I've emphasized in every workshop I've taught, too) is the importance of being a good neighbor if you're a tiny house dweller (or really if you have neighbors at all!) This was one of the key Community Living Agreements at Simply Home Community, too. (Right up there with "Don't be a jerk!")
So here at Going Places we're all learning how to be the best neighbors we can be, both in our little community and with the folks in our neighborhood. Sometimes that means not cranking the music when doing yardwork as loud as we might otherwise. Sometimes that means shoveling the drive for someone who has a harder time doing it. Sometimes that means stopping to visit with people at the farmer's market or on the corner. Sometimes that means sharing the bounty from the garden.
And sometimes being a good neighbor means inviting everyone over for snacks and porch time, which is what we did last night.
Isha and I had hosted a really well-attended neighborhood holiday party shortly after we moved into the common house at Going Places, so we knew we had a bunch of great neighbors. We also made a point before we moved our tiny houses to the property to check in with all the immediately surrounding neighbors (and all the ones who had direct sight-lines). We told them what we were up to and asked them to let us know if they had any concerns. That's how we learned which neighbors had concerns about noise and which had concerns about visual privacy. So when we moved the tinies here we made a point to keep the noise down and to put static cling frosting on the windows on one side of the house while we're scheming additional landscaping.
So now that we're settling in we decided to show folks what we've done with the place. We invited everyone on our end of the block to c'mon over for snacks, drinks, and house tours last night and... ALL the neighbors showed up! (Well almost. We had representation from all the houses surrounding us but one and we think that may be due to a language barrier.)
We had a splendid time visiting with our neighbors, hearing about their homes and projects and lives, learning more about our neighborhood history (even on a geological timeline!), and watching the dogs romp with PieHead. There was talk of another neighborhood gathering soon and we're already looking forward to it! It feels good to be getting neighborly.
How do you get neighborly where you live?!