The
Kindness of Strangers
“There
are those who make you feel inside as if you are drinking a good, warm soup,
even if you are hungry and the two of you have nothing to eat. In spite of
that, they nourish you.”
Bodil
Bredsdorff (The Crow-Girl: Children of the Crow Cove)
I’ve
been walking Liza at six o’clock in the morning because the street gets too hot
for her feet later. In my neighborhood there lives a very “eccentric” man who
has surrounded his little house with a stacked stone wall—large stones. He’s
created a peace symbol from rocks on the ground in his front yard, and he puts
out bowls of water for the critters. In the spring, he planted a garden amid
the stones, which, by the way, are topped by small plastic gnomes and little
scenes of everyday life in the elf and fairy world. When Liza and I went by
this morning, he came out of his house and told me to take some produce from a
bucket he’d put out: “It’s free. Take as much as you want.” In the plastic bucket
were beautiful tomatoes and cucumbers he’d grown in his stone garden. I chose a
couple of each, thanked him for his generosity, and headed on home. “There’ll
be more in a few days. Come get some more for yourself,” he called after me.
I don’t
know this man, but we speak now and then when I encounter him in his yard. Once
he was juggling bowling pins and performed a brief demonstration just for me.
My sense of him is that he is a kind soul who tries to make connections in a
world that does not support eccentricity, or really, anything else that’s
different. I put the tomatoes and cucumbers in a bowl on my counter and smiled
when I thought about the cucumber sandwich I will have for breakfast.
I
remember as a child growing up in a small town, waking up on a summer morning
to find a bushel of corn or a big basket of half-runners outside the kitchen
door. Often, when people could not pay their surveying bill, my dad happily
took payment in corn and beans, but most of the time, we didn’t know who left
them. We’d spend the day on the carport shucking corn and snapping beans for Mother
to blanch and freeze. The kindness of strangers is still appreciated; maybe even
more now that the world has so many sharp-edges.
The
figs are almost ready to pick, and the blueberries are ripening. You or I could
easily become generous with our produce. We could pass on the kindness of my
neighbor, the eccentric stranger, who knows how to
juggle bowling pins and grow cucumbers.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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