Neighborhood
Mar. 18th, 2013 04:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tympsI just shoveled a bunch of snow. I'm not sure how much we've gotten so far. Half a foot?
It's still windy and snowing, so the shoveling was difficult. I'm not in as good of shape as I'd like to be either, so it definitely got my heart pounding, which did feel good.
After I finished, I sat down on the frozen steps to cool down but also to enjoy the stillness at 4:30 AM. I could only hear the faint beeping and whirring of distant snow plows. The only sources of light were the streetlights which would fade in and out at discernible intervals. Occasionally a car or two would pass slowly.
I got to thinking about the neighborhood as a whole. As I was sitting on my front steps, I could see directly down the avenue across from my street. There are two rows of houses on either side of the avenue. There were many people sleeping in their little boxes--all rambler style, just like mine--and it occurred to me that I didn't know a thing about any of them. I really only know the neighbors directly to either side of our house, and I barely even know them. How strange that there are so many people who have such similar experiences as I do. We all get up and leave our houses from approximately the same spot. We all deal with the same snow plows, same mail carriers, same trash pick-up days. The world looks pretty much the same from all of our individual lots. While those experiences are overwhelmingly similar, there are plenty of experiences where we differ, and I don't even know what those would be.
Maybe I'm being overly verbose and flowery with all of this, but it just suddenly struck me as so odd that there are so many people who live in such close proximity to me...and I don't know a thing about them and they don't know a thing about me.
It's still windy and snowing, so the shoveling was difficult. I'm not in as good of shape as I'd like to be either, so it definitely got my heart pounding, which did feel good.
After I finished, I sat down on the frozen steps to cool down but also to enjoy the stillness at 4:30 AM. I could only hear the faint beeping and whirring of distant snow plows. The only sources of light were the streetlights which would fade in and out at discernible intervals. Occasionally a car or two would pass slowly.
I got to thinking about the neighborhood as a whole. As I was sitting on my front steps, I could see directly down the avenue across from my street. There are two rows of houses on either side of the avenue. There were many people sleeping in their little boxes--all rambler style, just like mine--and it occurred to me that I didn't know a thing about any of them. I really only know the neighbors directly to either side of our house, and I barely even know them. How strange that there are so many people who have such similar experiences as I do. We all get up and leave our houses from approximately the same spot. We all deal with the same snow plows, same mail carriers, same trash pick-up days. The world looks pretty much the same from all of our individual lots. While those experiences are overwhelmingly similar, there are plenty of experiences where we differ, and I don't even know what those would be.
Maybe I'm being overly verbose and flowery with all of this, but it just suddenly struck me as so odd that there are so many people who live in such close proximity to me...and I don't know a thing about them and they don't know a thing about me.
