A Good Neighbor is a Blessing

For the past 23 years, Karen and Mark W. and their family have been our neighbors. That is the longest time to be living right next door to the same family for me. Their presence is a fixture of our reality, and we have been blessed by their presence. Having very few family to begin with, and even more so 23 years and a lot of tragedies later, and having a husband who has very little family and very little contact with them, only added to the charm of having a very stable and loving family next door. We saw their four children grow up, get married and now Karen and Mark have ten grandchildren so far. Especially their youngest son, Brent, who just had a beautiful baby boy, was very special to us when we first moved into the neighborhood. We were still trying to have a baby, and when we moved next door, Brent had just turned five. So Karen in her wisdom thought it might be nice for us to have Brent come over and visit with us. He was a delight and kept the hope alive that someday I would get pregnant and have a child of my own. That did happen about 3 years later, and I had Nicholas at age 35. Brent was so much fun to have around. He would have dinner with us, bring over his favorite movies, spend the night with his favorite stuffed animals who all had their own stories and names. He was very comfortable with himself and a great story teller, who really had the gift of gab.He filled an aching part in my heart with his easy and disarming ways, his very sincere personality and clever observations. Once our son Nicholas was born, Brent became Nicholas' first friend, and our son still has a picture in his room of him and Brent together. Brent was in a way Nicholas 's big brother next door. It was so much fun to go to Brent' s wedding reception and later on to receive darling videos of his baby boy. Karen and Mark filled what would have been a void for us, with their presence, their commitment to their family, their kind way of including us whenever they could. It is so wonderful to see how rewarding it is to stick together as a family, on good days and bad, and to see how this family now has four great adult children all with families of their own. It warms my heart to hear their grandchildren play next door when they come over, to hear their laughter, their energy, and it must be so satisfying for Karen and Mark to see the love they have for each other passed on through their sons and daughters and now a whole group of grandchildren. It gives me hope for the future. The great Nobel Prize winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote: "Every child that is born is proof that God has not yet given up on the world."  A good neighbor is a blessing, and Karen an Mark and their children certainly have been a blessing as our steadfast neighbors all these years, giving living proof to the poet Tagore's words and sustenance to my hope.