We’re expanding our garden area this year, and we needed topsoil. We’ll likely be doing some re-landscaping later on this year, too, so I’ve been investigating a good source of dirt. Oddly enough, good dirt is neither plentiful nor “dirt cheap.” (Or iis it always dirt cheap, regardless of the price?)
This weekend I saw a pile of dirt show up in front of my neighbors’ house. It looked like pretty good stuff, so the next day I went to ask them where they got it and how much it had cost. They told me they were done with what they needed and to come take what I wanted. No charge.
Did I mention my neighbors are awesome?
The next night my son and I went to get a few wheelbarrows full. Our neighbor on the other side also showed up with his wheelbarrow–he’d asked our neighbor about sourcing and pricing, too, and had been extended the same offer. He’d been building a box garden frame a few weeks previous and was in the process of filling it up. It turned out there was plenty for us both. When I got what we needed my son and I helped get the rest carted off to the other neighbor’s yard. Then we worked together to sweep up the street where the pile had been. There are plans for baked goods to find their way to our soil-sharing neighbor.
Niceness breed niceness. There’s a general spirit of good will in our cul-de-sac at the moment, which began with one neighbor simply being generous with something of which he had an excess. To riff on the old credit card commercial, load of dirt: $200. Bringing the neighborhood closer together: priceless.
What you give is … generally what you get. sadly oodles of people think that the rules apply to everyone BUT themselves and that nice = stupid, but thankfully that isn’t the case with everyone.