We have a 6 foot by 20 foot strip of lawn on the other side of our driveway that joins our neighbor Mike's lawn. When we moved in here five years ago, I conscientiously took my lawnmower over there and mowed the little strip. Half the time, Mike would just mow my strip of lawn when he was mowing his, and finally he told me he'd just do it with his lawn because it only takes him a couple of minutes more and it doesn't make any sense for me to do it. So, Mike does part of my lawn.

We have a barberry hedge in the backyard, jointly shared with George and Marie, who live behind us. George takes great pride in keeping the hedge beautifully trimmed, and when I bought a hedge clipper, he made it clear that he'd really appreciate continuing to do our side. He likes to help others, and he is an artiste with a hedge clipper. So, George does our side of the barberry hedge in our backyard. And when his hedge-clipper broke, I gave him mine with the proviso that I could borrow it when I needed it.

We have a high hedge of a variety of shrubs that separates our yard from Bill and Joanne. Bill is almost blind from too many years of doing arc welding without protecting his eyes, and he can hardly walk out to the car. So, I do their side of the hedge between us, as well as our side. It's a Hell of a job, which I just finished this morning. There are a lot of grape vines (which never produce grapes) on their side of the hedge and they climb all the way up into our dogwood trees, They are a real pain (mentally and physically) to cut back and strip out of the trees, and they grow faster than Jack's beanstalk. It took me two hours to cut their side of the hedge this morning and it will take another couple of hours to haul several loads of cutting down to the dump, one at a time in the trunk of my car. But, I was especially pleased to do it this time. Early in June while we were out celebrating my Mom's birthday, they had a torrential downpour around here and flooded Bill and Joanne's basement so badly that they had to rip out the flooring and the walls, air hammer a channel and install a sump pump. That was no sooner finished than Joanne's younger sister, who'd been a heroine addict for many years committed suicide. They are really hurting, over there. So I cut their side of the high hedge. George does their side of the barberry hedge that separates his property from theirs.

This morning, I was up on a step ladder struggling to reach across the top of the hedge (which gets as high as ten feet tall) to cut the new growth. George saw me struggling and came over to help hold the ladder. He was cleaning up the branches he'd just trimmed off the barberry hedge on Bill and Joanne's side of the hedge and was just leaning over to pick up a big handful of branches when he noticed me and stopped.

After George helped me, he went over to resume his work and noticed something shining in the pile of trimmed branches he was about to pick up before he stopped to come over to help me. He hadn't noticed them before. When he looked more carefully, he saw several large pieces of broken glass from a bottle he'd seen on Bill and Joanne's lawn before the guy came over to mow their lawn. They all ended up mixed in with the branches that George had been about to pick up. He didn't see them when he was first going to pick them up, and probably would have cut his hands, because he wasn't wearing gloves.

George told me this whole story when he came back over to talk to me. He said, "You know, when you help someone else, God sends someone to help you. If I hand't come over to help you, I would have cut my hands all up, trying to help Bill and Joanne." Now, you can interpret what happened in any way, and that's valid. I do believe that when you are focused on helping others, you often discover that something happens to prevent you from getting hurt, or helps you in a way you probably wouldn't have been helped if you hadn't helped someone else. I told George, "When I burn CDs and send them off to people on the internet (Mudcat) who I barely know, they want to know what they can do for me. I tell them, do something unexpected for someone you barely know, and you'll be doing it for me."

What goes around comes around..

Jerry