I’ve always had this nasty habit of trying to do nice things for people. I like helping my friends move, clean, and then move again; helping to paint their houses, apartments, cars, whatever. So when our French neighbours (from France) move in across the street the first thing I did was to bring them a “welcome basket” with vegetables from my garden. This was the first mistake. Since then it’s been a back-and-forth of friendly good deeds that are never ending and seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past month. Let me explain…
August 5th they invite us over for dinner. Since our kids are teenagers and therefore we can sleep in on the weekends, we completely forgot that their two children (aged 2-1/2 and 6) wake up at 6:30 in the morning. Without thinking, the four of us (me, my Dave, and the two neighbours) stayed up until 3:00am drinking bottle after bottle of red wine and plotting how to take over the internet with “Walk-the-Paedia” (our own version of Wikipedia, which is better than Wikipedia for reasons I can no longer recall). Obviously, Dave and I felt terrible the next day. Terrible in that we were hungover, but worse that we knew they were up early with the young children while we slept. So, we devised a super-fantastical-good-deed-plan that would even things up. We decided to watch their kids for a night while they ventured out into the city for dinner and sight-seeing. This worked out well because the weekend we offered this to them was the weekend I was watching my 2-1/2 year old niece and it would be a good opportunity for her to socialize with kids her own age. Anyway, so we take their kids and they go out and everything is evened out – they had us over for dinner, we watch their kids – even Steven, right? No.
Around 11:30pm they get back and we’re sitting on their back patio having a glass of wine (all the kids are asleep and have been for awhile), when I see the mister neighbour come through with a bag from Lush. I’m all “OMG, you guys have got to show me what you bought at Lush!!” Then he smiles and is all “well, it for you” and I’m thinking “WHAT!?!?! NO!!!!” but I accept the package gracefully and open it to find my most favourite Lush treasures. Again the French have one up on me. I mean, who goes out on their night off from the kids and buys the babysitter something? Common!
So, feeling indebted and not knowing how to repay that debt, nature came in to save the day! Two days ago Hurricane Irene swept through here leaving some houses flooded or without power, or both; and taking down a few trees along the way. The neighbour’s tree was split in three. It wasn’t a huge tree or anything like that but it definitely required a clean-up. Yesterday morning, as I was heading out to buy wine (not to drink right away!), I saw Ms. Neighbour attempting to cut down the remains of the stump and clean-up the debris all the while trying to keep an eye on her little scamps. This was my chance to make even! I asked if she needed a hand, she said okay, and within the next three hours we had the branches cut, piled and tied, the stump down to the ground, and the leaves raked for her compost-thing. Afterwards, while enjoying a beer in the backyard, she said “Thank you so much for your help, maybe I can…” “NO!” I interrupted, “There’s nothing I need! We’re even now so don’t mess that up!”
She laughed and said it’s not about being even. I don’t know what she meant by this because I’m a middle child and everything ALWAYS has to be even.
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