• BarrierWithAshes@fedia.io
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    4 months ago

    That’s good to hear. Heard too many stories of people complaining there’s no neighbourly communities anymore, that kids spend all their time on phones. We have a similar thing going on here but a lot us are still new at this whole thing.

    • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      I’m too old to know what kids are doing most of the time, tbh, but the kids on my street spend most of their time outside, tons of kids walk to and from school, it’s just a pleasant, generally low-key area. It helps that half my local area is dead ends due to the train tracks a couple blocks away in any direction, so not a lot of street traffic, emboldening kids to play outside.

      The majority of people of whom I am aware on my street are really nice and neighborly, or at least leave me alone, but it’s a rural-ish area and there are people who think laws don’t apply to them and their dogs… those people suck. The rest tho… my neighbor mowed my lawn for a year for me when I was sort of not capable myself, because he saw I had a company coming out and wanted to save me money, so now we sort of share the part of our lots that meet; because he mows it and I don’t have to think about it, I let him use it to store shit outside of his fence, even tho it’s mostly my property that I’m not using anyway. The old dude who used to mow in his tightie-whities gave me half a garden bed of lettuce because it overgrew. Just came up to my door one day with a bowl of dirty salad and said “here, it’s butter crisp. If you want more I have more.” And left. The neighbor directly across the street (where the black fam is moving in) often got my mail and brought it back, and so on. We all just exist here, sure, but it’s a pleasant area. Not like the communities of old, but… as good as ones likely to get these days.

      My new business neighbor is even taking my advice to be a better neighbor. It’s a warehouse nobody ever really used, and he doesn’t plan to use it that often either, so he’s going to change the building lights from omnidirectional eyesores into unidirectional, illuminating his property and the sidewalk around it but not my walls or the windows of houses across the street.

      But I grew up in an area where we didn’t lock doors, the postman, whomever it was, came into the house to deliver packages (technically a porch but not really… we also lived directly next to the post office so I’m sure my parents knew them well enough), I knew all the cops, and they lived in town (knew them due to my neighbor being a drug house, using said post office parking lot for house parties while on probation) and the mayor was my moms bff (best gay friend -he thought that acronym was stupendous!) I helped him with his campaign by printing t-shirts in my highschool photography lab back in like 2003 (which had a screen printer). So super small town vibe. This is close but not really the same.