Friday, December 6, 2013

The Right Thing?

Hopefully I did the right thing yesterday......

Let me start by saying that I am NO Gladys Kravitz. In fact, I could not tell you the names of any of my neighbors and would not be able to point them out in a line up.

Early Wednesday morning at about 2:30, Leo wakes me up barking, which he never does. He usually doesn't need to get up and go out in the middle of the night and when he does, he is good about ringing the bell by the door and somehow no matter how softly he rings that I can hear it and will zombie-like stumble from bed and let him out. So, when he is barking it definitely wakes me up and scares me a bit. I got up and let him out, but he continued to bark and it got through my addled, sleepy-hazed mind that the lighting outside was not right and I could here large trucks running. So, I pulled a Gladys and peaked out my windows to see what the heck was going on. Turns out there was a fire and an ambulance truck at my neighbor's house. They had arrived sans sirens, which makes me think that they are actually considerate of people and unless there is traffic that they need to warn of their approach that perhaps emergency vehicles don't just willy-nilly run their sirens...but I digress. I couldn't really see what was going on with the ambulance and, although I was curious, I didn't want to be THAT nosey of a neighbor and put on clothes and shoes and investigate. Instead, I cleaned off Leo's feet and we went back to bed.

I didn't think anything more about my neighbor until Thursday afternoon when a winter storm hit the area and ice started building up on anything that didn't move. I noticed that my neighbor had a couple of packages sitting on his front porch. They had been sitting there on Wednesday afternoon as well and were still there 24 hours later. So, I went over and took those packages and brought them into my house. One of them had already formed a layer of ice, so I scraped all of the ice off of it and now both packages are sitting in my living room. I left a note tucked into his door (I know it is a him because I did meet him one time out by the mailbox) and I think I found him on Facebook and left a message there for a complete stranger.

We shall see if I hear from him.....If I don't, what do I do with the packages? I don't know if he is in the hospital and for how long. Do I just wait until the weather clears up and then take the packages back over and leave them for him? Do I call the police in a couple of days and find out from them what I should do? I don't want to be arrested for mail theft. I don't want my neighbors to think that I go around taking things from people's porches. I would hope that somebody would do something similar for me if the need ever arose.

1 comment:

Sara said...

Interesting. Yeah, I do not know most of my neighbors either, although I somehow keep meeting more and more of them. I vote just hold onto the packages until someone responds to the note. Check ever so often that the note is still there. Hmmmmm