Great Neighbours

Our first house was originally going to be a five-year home: 10 years, max, if we had good neighbours.

Twenty-four years later, we're still in the same place.

We almost moved about a year and a half ago. A friend was selling his house and DW was in love with the place, but in the end we decided to stay put. We had recently become mortgage-free and I have my eye on retirement, in the next few years, so the prospect of taking out a sizable mortgage for this house didn't make a lot of sense.

One afternoon, last summer, as DW and I were relaxing on our front porch, chatting with our neighbours, who were relaxing on their front porch, I let slip that we had almost bought my friend's house, and their jaws dropped.

"No way!" said one.

"You are not allowed to move unless there's a house, next to it, that we can move into," said the other.

Yeah, they're great neighbours.

More than anything else, our neighbours are the reason that we've remained in our first and only house. There are people on our street that we've known since we've first moved in, who are more like friends than co-residents of our street. We've had good neighbours who used to live on either side of us but have moved away, only to be replaced by equally good neighbours.

We've had neighbours keep an eye on our house, even taking the time to remove snow from our driveway, unasked, when we've been traveling. One neighbour, who didn't know we were away, was concerned for me when he noticed that a day had gone by since snow fell and I wasn't out to clear the driveway. He knew how I liked to keep my driveway a particular way, right after a storm, and so he checked in and was out with his snowblower when no one came to the door.

Yup, great neighbours.

It's important to have people around you who keep an eye on you and your home, who you can count on to be there in times of need. I've really thought of this importance over the past few days, after some horror befell our neighbourhood, last Friday.

DW and I work from home, so we're able to see if anything happens on our street during the day, as well as at night. And on Friday afternoon, as I was at my desk, on the main floor next to our front window, DW called down to me from the study.

"Did you see black smoke blow past the window?" she asked.

I have my back to the window so I don't even notice when a courier has delivered a package to our front steps. My phone notifies me when our doorbell camera spots someone but it doesn't tell me that there's smoke overhead.

We both stepped outside and looked down our street, only to see a thick plume of black smoke rising above the rooflines at the end of our street. As we watched, we heard loud pops, like gunfire, and DW got jittery.

"That's a car on fire," I suspected, aloud. "That explains the black smoke, and the noises were likely the gas tank rupturing and the tires exploding." I started walking down our street, toward the smoke.

DW was still nervous but we made our way toward the fire. In the distance, we could hear approaching fire trucks and we could see that some police SUVs were already on scene.

Our street ends at another side street from the main road in our 'hood. And once we reached the end of our street, the smoke had changed from black to grey. One fire engine was already parked in the front of the house and at least two others were close by. A ladder truck, parked across the street from the fire, was beginning to raise the boom, to which a hose was attached.

The garage of the house was completely gone; the house, blanketed in the dense, fog-like smoke. The house next to it, closer to us, also had smoke coming from under the roof. In a matter of moments, it was clear that it, too, was on fire.

More people were coming out to witness the horror. I recognized a lot of my neighbours and we all murmured that we hoped that no one was inside, that anybody who was at home had got out safely. We later learned that there had been five pets in the first house, and all had been rescued.

As flames broke through the roof of the second house, I captured a short video. But not wanting to stay long, DW and I made our way back to our own home, where our three cats were safe.

At the end of my work day, I walked down to our mailbox but also returned to the fire scene, where only one fire truck was left, the fire fighters tidying its hoses and preparing to leave. Some police units were still there but they, too, were readying to leave.

The fires were extinguished, there was nothing left to take care of.

The residents of the second house to catch fire were allowed into their home. Apart from one side of the house and parts of the roof, the house seemed intact, though I could only imagine the smoke damage and the flooding from having water doused on the roof, making its way everywhere.

The residents had packed up what they could and were passing them to their neighbours who lived on the other side, away from the burned-out first house. Neighbours helping neighbours through a nightmare situation.

Great neighbours.

Over the weekend, DW and I were able to chat with our neighbours about the fire. We were all grateful that we knew that, had we experienced the same misfortune as the folks around the corner, we had people that we could rely on to have our backs to help each other in times of need.

How could we have possibly considered moving, the other year. This might have been our five-year home, initially, but it's now our forever home. I can't imagine living next to better neighbours.

(I'm still looking to move to Portugal after I retire, but that's going to be a tough decision.)