Blog Your Blessings Sunday: Neighbors and Other Strangers

Out for a walk late yesterday morning, I come up on a woman in a pick-up truck calling to two little barefoot boys to go home. She means well; they are outside without an adult. But they freeze. She tries it in Spanish because you never know. But these kids are Polish, and they don't know what she means or why on earth she is yelling at them.

"They're too small; they shouldn't be alone!" she shouts to me when I get to where this transaction is--or really isn't--taking place. They stop crying when they see me. Like so many of my neighbors, they know me because they see me out walking all the time. I'm the stranger who is like a lamppost in their lives, familiar and expected to always be there but that's about it. It's enough.

We're idling over what to do next about these boys when down the road careens a college kid in an old white Pontiac. "Oh my God! They're grandmother just sent everyone out in the woods looking for them! She's outside right now!" And away he goes.

With that, Maggie--we exchanged names when this was all over--speeds away to get Grandma while I wait with these fuzzy-headed little non-English-speaking-boys who know nothing about me except I'm outside as much as they are. Maggie brings the Grandma back, who bounds out of the cab of that pick-up in a leap and scoops up her babies.

It's over. We all go on our way--five adults who were unknown to each other until that moment of looking after two little boys free and innocent as the dancing sunshine they followed down the road on summertime Saturday. It's a blessing when the bad guys don't come out but the good guys do, in numbers.