The Neighborhood Series: Never Uncertain, But Often Wrong

Let me just state the obvious: I'm wrong. In fact, I am wrong a lot. For those of you who know my husband, you can commiserate with me, right? Before I get too carried away, the sad fact is that I really am wrong. A lot. I have a corner on all-things social science, but Neil knows so much more than me about the world, history, and how things work. I chalk it up to being old. But, I digress. 


Neil and I are both "never uncertain, but often wrong" people. We were both wrong about our future neighborhood. Thank goodness!


We first visited our street about eight months before we made an offer on our house. In fact, it was in large measure the street which deterred us...and an unreasonably high asking price on what is now our house. We visited Amesbury and our future neighborhood in October 2007. We were discouraged at what we could afford, one hour south of Saco -- the only single family home on a small in-town lot, on a beat-up street filled with multi-units, in an old New England mill town. You've seen those neighborhoods, right? So had we. In fact, we had lived in them before. We owned multi-units ourselves in those kinds of neighborhoods. After living in our own multi-unit for 11 years, this isn't exactly what we dreamed would come next for us when we thought about finally buying our own single family home. 


We were so wrong.


When the real estate market started to tank, the price came down on our future home. The next time that we visited the property, Blackberry--our former Lab, dashed into the river and did some swimming. We talked to a couple of the residents. Everything seemed a bit more tolerable. 


Have I mentioned just how wrong we were?


We eventually bought the house. There was a 3 weeks gap between when we bought the house and when we moved in. I started making visits to our new house on my trips back and forth to work, to drop off some belongings, to check the mail, and to make sure that no one had broken into our new home. On one such occasion, one neighbor, an older man with a near toothless grin, toddled down the street and said in no uncertain terms without making much eye contact, "Checking the mail?" And, this was our introduction to the neighborhood. Meet Bob, our wonderful neighbor, Bob - who my readers will hear more about later.


We never could have predicted how wrong we could have been.


Within hours of our move, two other neighbors visited us, Carol and her grown son, Max. My readers will hear more about them later, too. Then, about two weeks after our move, we started to take down a small bundle of trees that was blocking my view of the river. We weren't out in our yard 15 minutes when our next door neighbor, Richard, showed up -- quiet and unassuming. Neil, looking exasperated, mentioned that such-and-such tool was misplaced during our move. Richard said, "I've got that tool. I'll be right back." Ten minutes later, Richard was back with two or three examples of said tool; he stayed for three hours helping us saw down trees, dig up roots, and then offered to haul away the trees in his truck - after all, his boss was looking for kindling. 

Here is a pretty accurate picture of our street. Bob and his great-granddaughter, Ava, are  up the street on the left. The  yellow auto is Richard's former truck that he bought to plow our street because he was unhappy with the town's plowing efforts.

Another good picture of our street, again featuring Bob and Ava, and Richard in the background.

We not only have a small haven here in our house, gardens, and small river, we have a haven here on our street. It's a wonderful thing to be wrong. It may be Neil's only experience with being wrong (wink-wink), but he's especially glad to have been wrong...just this one time, of course.


Stay tuned for more posts about our wonderful neighborhood in what I will call The Neighborhood series.