Neighborhood Bliss

I love our neighborhood. It's not a ritzy sort of place by any means, and granted there are a few details I would change about it. But in general, we have found a great place! We live on a dead end street with a large grassy park at the end of it. It's almost as good as the neighborhood I grew up in! :) (Sorry, but you just can't beat living on a dead end street with a church parking lot taking up half of one side, an elementary school playground at the end of the street, another school playground across from the church, and a public park across from that school. If we got bored riding bikes all over the parking lot and climbing in church's trees, we'd go play on the school toys. If that got boring we'd go to the other school (once we were old enough to cross the "busy street" by ourselves) and when we really got bored we'd get permission to go to the public park. Life was good. Oh, and no one had fences between yards so we could run the whole length of the street on grass. Barefeet, here we come!! It was bliss.

So this is a pretty close second. The yards may be smaller, and everyone has privacy fences around the backyards, but it's pretty good.

As an adult, here's what I'm excited about lately. Thursday night we had a neighborhood watch meeting. It was the first and there was a good turnout. It was great to see so many people that care about keeping it a safe place and knowing our neighbors so can keep each other safe. Now, there have been a few homes questionable activity going on, but thanks to the watchful and concerned neighbors that we have, those people are mostly gone. If only we can influence the landlords to keep those questionable-type people out of their rentals...

Then, last night, we had a street barbecue. It was good to meet a few neighbors that I've never met before. There are still quite a few that I don't know, but I'm glad to be able to faces and names with the houses I drive and walk by...And live next to! It's sad to me that so many people don't know their neighbors. How can you trust people you don't know? And why would you want to live next to people you don't trust. Granted, there's always a few people in your life that you trusted more before actually meeting them and then find out things you wish you didn't know...But for the most part I like to believe that people are just out to live their life and not get in anyone's way, just like me.

So, anyway, I'm just excited to see people out of their homes and talking to each other! Now, the only thing we need to add to this pretty picture is some sort of system to know who's coming and going from the rentals on the street. It seems that some people move out of the rentals over night and we had no idea they were leaving. And then new people move in again. I guess there's nothing wrong with being a little old fashioned and bringing by a batch of homemade cookies and an introduction...