The folks whose small farm is behind ours called the other night to invite Leah and me over to see a hummingbird nest they’ve discovered in a tree on their property. I like it when things like this happen. The neighbors might have called and invited us over for a special dinner, or to watch a movie with them on TV, and that would have been nice. But that they called to share something simple like birds nesting in their tree...well, to my way of thinking, that is about as good as neighborliness gets.
Several days later, Leah and I had house guests and they asked me to take them on a hike. I called my friend, Tim, who lives here in town and, like me, is an outdoor guy. I invited Tim to come along on the hike, and Tim brought two of his friends, a human and a dog. We all piled into Tim’s truck and headed to the Olympic Mountains where we did a cool hike on a perfect day in the most amazingly beautiful setting, you’d think we were walking through some computer-generated movie landscape that couldn’t actually be real.
Simple gifts, these: Good neighbors; a fine hike on a picture-postcard summer day.
Thanks for coming along.
