OFI 746: Rural Communities, The Last Bastion Of Neighborliness

We ran into an interesting situation this weekend that reminded me of how we should behave with neighbors.  Autumm was out running on the canal that goes behind our home, and during the run a neighbor’s dog ran through the canal, because it is dry for the winter, and over to Autumm and our dog.  Autumm was afraid that the dog was going to follow her out to the road and get hit, so she told it to go home.

At about the same time that this was happening, the dog’s owner was coming out back to call his dog home.  He heard Autumm telling the dog to go home, and before they could speak Autumm had jogged off.  That left the dog’s owner wondering why that person was telling his dog to go home when the dog was already home and the other person was not on their property.

Where we live the canals and canal roads all go across private property.  There is an easement that allows the canal company to access the area, run water down it and maintain the canal.  Residents of the area often mis-interpret this to be public access, but it is not.

The owner of the dog decided to address this with a post on a Facebook community site.  I saw this post later that morning and thought “this is going to create a controversy”.  And, it certainly did.  Even though what the property owner posted was factually correct and not aggressive at all, people in the community had a lot of harsh words over property owners wanting to control who accesses their property.

As I read through this I saw that Autumm was wearing her running clothes, and I knew that her running path takes her past the area described by the property owner in the post.  I asked her about it, and she had indeed had another dog chase her and she had told it to go home at that end of the canal.  It was her that he had posted about!

I realized right then and there that I had been delinquent as a neighbor.  We knew every other neighbor that we shared the canal with except for these folks.  Since these folks lived on the other side of the canal and it is usually full of water, we never have had the need to contact them.  However, I should have taken the initiative regardless, just to be a good neighbor.

So, I decided that today was the day and drove over to their place.  Outside of social media and face to face, we had a great conversation.  Everyone understood the mixup on what happened, and we realized that we all face similar issues living on the canal.

In this day and age of social media and texting it is way too easy to just shoot off a couple of lines to somebody rather than to take the time to make a face to face conversation happen.  If you choose to communicate through a text, email or social media post you are leaving it up to the reader to attach a tone to your message.  You might say something totally innocent, but those same words could be interpreted poorly in the wrong context.  The only way to insure that the words are communicated in the proper context is to have the conversation face to face.

All of us, as people who have rural values and living in rural communities, are looked at with nostalgia by folks in the city because we are the last group of Americans to cling to older values like neighborliness.  It is our job to continue these values in our communities in the hopes that one day they can return to the cities.

Try to find the time in your busy schedules to meet those neighbors that you don’t already know, and to do it face to face.

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