A Thank You and a Tribute

Birthday card envelope made from a recycled Whole Foods bag

How do I love The Heights?

Let me recount one of the ways...

On White Linen Night, we went to Onion Creek to celebrate my neighbor's birthday. The aforementioned neighbor does a lot for us. He and his wife water our plants when we're out of town, share their basil with us, provide expert consultation (and often labor) on our home improvement projects, call us when there's something on Woot they think we might like, put my name on estate sale signs at midnight (while I'm sleeping) to ensure I get a good spot in line--the list goes on.

After Hurricane Ike when my neighbor was rebuilding the fence between our two houses, he followed my request and built a gate connecting our two yards. How cool is that?

When his birthday rolled around, we decided to make him a handmade card and give him a gift certificate to Lowe's. We presented it to him at Onion Creek at his impromptu birthday party.

Then we went away to an educational conference for a week. When we returned, the card (and gift certificate) were on our front porch with this note attached:

Hello!

My name is Mark and I manage Onion Creek. This GC was found by my staff and I wanted to get it back to its rightful recipient. Call me if I've dropped it at the wrong house please.

Apparently, our neighbor left his present on the table at Onion Creek, and the manager took it upon himself to figure out that it came from me and to hand-deliver it to my house.

That's pretty much all the evidence I need to proclaim that we live in the Best Neighborhood Ever.

Seriously.

I called Mark to thank him for being such a superhero. How easy would it have been for any of the staff members at Onion Creek to throw the card away? Or to keep the gift certificate for themselves? Or to set the card and gift certificate to the side and forget about them altogether?

It takes a lot of integrity and follow-through to hand deliver a lost item to someone's house. This is the kind of neighborhood we live in. It's a place where normal people morph into superheroes to help a fellow neighbor out.

Thank you to Mark, the manager at Onion Creek, and to all of you who have gone (and will continue to go) above and beyond to help out a fellow neighbor. You make our neighborhood (and the world) a better place.