Therefore I have known quite some Kiwi neighbours. There is a saying that all Chinese are very familiar with - "遠親不如近鄰“ meaning a relative living afar is not as helpful as a neighbour nearby. Indeed, a neighbor whom you have good relation with is very important, particularly to an immigration family.
Influenced by the traditional culture with regard to the art of getting along with neighbors, I devoted a great deal of my effort in building harmonious relationship with our Kiwi neighbors from the day one when we just moved into our first residence.
The latest known neighbors are Bruce and his wife on the section in front of ours; Nivelle and his wife are on the opposite to us across the road; Peter and his wife are on our right side; Frank and his wife Ginny are neighboring to us over our back yard border. All of these 4 Kiwi neighbors have been retired, each of them offered their caring minds, friendly solid help to us. I am writing this blog post to express my gratitude to them. Now, let me write the most impressive kindness they have done to me from the most recent episode.
Local weather forecast predicts that it will become raining from this evening. So I decided to mow the lawn before the garden becomes soggy again from the rain.
When I have done both of the front and back yards, I pushed my mower up the slope of the drive way to cut the small stripe of land along the driveway side of Bruce's property. I started up the engine and began to cut. May be my unstable walk gait due to my Parkinson's Disease attracted Peter's attention, when I was halfway through the completion, I noticed someone walking toward me from the driveway. I turned around and saw a very friendly smiley face of Peter. The mower was roaring loud. Peter used hand gesture to tell me that he wanted to help me to mow the grass. I put my mouth as close to his right ear as possible to tell him, "I can manage to do this myself without problem, after all, I need some exercise otherwise I will become totally inactive soon. Thank your kind offer." I thumbed up my left hand to him trying to make him understand I appreciate his good will. He initiated the sincere offer, and that touched my heart.
There is a narrow stripe of grass land in-between the right side of Bruce's fence and the driveway. Though so small that piece of grass land is, it can turn into an eyesore if you leave it without regular grass cutting. So I used to be doing it everytime when I mowed the lawn. I think it was about 3 years ago when my disease made me emaciated to a degree that Bruce astoned to ask me why I had become so skinny when we came across each other in the garden over the fence one day. Since then I noticed that he always did his mowing on Fridays, while I liked to do it on Saturdays, and he also cut that stipe of grass land each time.
To my impression, Neville is a literate as I was told by a family friend that Neville was teaching voluntarily in his English class held in a community centre. Once Neville asked me if he could come to my place to read 15 minutes of news from newspaper for me everyday because he thought the tremor of my hands made me impossible to hold newspaper steadily for reading. I politely declined his offer, instead I asked if he would like to mark my blog post before I published it on the web. He said yes.
The article I wrote was titled "having read The Shack". I prepared a two column page of Google Docs, and I wrote on the left column, and he moderated on the right column. He is undoubtedly a prominent writer as I found his skill of using the simplest word and sentence to modify my original to become so enjoyable an article to read that I envied him very much. I realized marking a student's essay was far more difficult and time-consuming than writing their own, and I supposed he must have a hard time on marking my essay, so I stopped asking him to do more for me. As to Frank, when he applied weed killer onto his garden, he voluntarily walked to my back yard to spray on the long messy grass along the ridges where the mower can not reach. Normally I will have to use my line trimmer to trim these difficult corners, however the line trimmer is not able to be started up successfully. Frank and his wife saw my struggle with the trimming equipment, and I believe that was why he started to do the weed control of my back yard for free.
These are my neighbors I have made friends with over the past 8 to 9 years. Now Bruce and his wife had just sold their house in April. One day when I saw him maintaining their family car in his back yard. Knowing he was leaving here soon, I walked toward him to say some farewell words. He said to me, "I have scheduled to say good bye to you at your door step when I hand this house over to the new owner."
On the day early in May, a sunny weekend, his wife knocked on our door, I opened and saw Bruce and his wife stood on the door steps. "We come to say goodbye to you." and both of us shook hands, carefully exhorting each other to take good care of our selves. And I wished them enjoying their new retirement life in Hamilton, the town they were from when they were young.
