Gratitude
A Gift from Our Next-Door Neighbors
Portable air conditioning units!
Usually, the weather is mild here in the Seattle area. It doesn’t often get super cold in the winter, and we typically will maybe have a week of heat that tops 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.
A lot of folks here don’t have central air conditioning or other ways to cool their homes. When a heat wave does happen in our area, it makes the news starting days ahead of time. People go and buy up the fans at the hardware stores, and stock up on sports drinks and watermelon at the grocery stores.
So we were pleasantly surprised last night to get a text message from the next-door neighbor, asking if we wanted some portable air conditioning units. I said yes, and she said we could come right over if we wanted.
The next-door neighbors are longtime partners, a man who was in the military and then a building inspector and now retired, and a woman who is a social worker employed by the state. I don’t mean to reduce them to their jobs; these are the kinds of things we know about each other — I imagine they think of me as the teacher next door.
As it turned out, they had three units they wanted to give away, one still in the original box and never used. They had central air installed this past year…
