Going on holidays?
If you are leaving your house and garden unoccupied for a few days, I hope you have lots of retired
neighbours. The safety of your property will be guaranteed because many eyes, older eyes, will be
watching.
Retired people,
especially the active ones, can’t help being vigilant. They are always out and about; they pay
attention to changes in their environment and share their observations.
Sometimes this intelligence is gleaned from actual interrogation, but often it
is just the result of careful surveillance. I recently tapped into the
informal, retiree neighbourhood-watch and have learned that:
- The owners have moved back into the house on the corner (Good. We all like owner-occupied properties.)
- The new folks across the street seem to have young children. Bikes have been spotted in the driveway. (Yeah! Young families keep neighbourhoods alive.)
- The Globe & Mail guy is delivering at 4 am now. (I’m not sure I care, but it is good to know that our 75 year-old insomniac neighbour has the night-time covered.)
Sometimes, though, the
observations hit really close to home. John, who lives two doors down, is an
active retiree, always working in his yard or jogging around the neighbourhood,
and he notices everything. He knows when you
need to cut your grass (and tells you so). He wonders aloud (in a joking manner) if you
are ever going to spread the mulch piled up in the driveway. He’ll say “I think you’ve got a skunk under
your barn, now. He’s been digging in my
lawn”. But I don’t mind that John is so keen-eyed and so pointed in his remarks.
He would know immediately if anything were amiss with our place, and
would know what to do about it.
In fact, we intend to
have John keep an eye on our house when we are on an upcoming cross-country
road trip. We couldn’t ask for anyone
better. No plants will die on his
watch. He will take house-sitting
seriously. And we are happy to reciprocate.
Now that we are around
a bit more during the day, John has been getting us to look after his
place when he is at the cottage. It is not much – we do a walk-through, take in the mail and water
the garden--and I think we have done a good job, almost up to his standard. Except for the skunk. I know John would like us
to trap and relocate it (we do possess a live trap). But our good-neighbourliness has its limits.
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