Loving our community

Ralph and I took a lot of ribbing when we decided to buy our new place because it was in a 55 plus community. Hey, we are both over 55!!! We are entitled. But people thought we might not like it because the community might be too quiet, too old, perhaps too cranky.

Admittedly, we are among the "youngsters" here. We are acquainted with people who've been married longer than either of us have been alive. And there are a few cranky folks here, but what neighborhood doesn't have those.

By far the vast majority of our neighbors are wonderful. They are lively, friendly and we have enjoyed getting to know them all. We can't go walking without stopping to talk with someone, usually several someones, and getting the mail becomes a community event! It's a rare occasion when you just get the mail and come home, there's almost always someone else getting their mail at the same time, so you chat, pretty soon someone else comes for their mail, a walker or two joins in and soon there's a pretty decent gab-fest going on.

We recently have been doing a major remodel of our yard. The whole street-side edge of our property had the dreaded junipers...a yukky plant that we've never liked. But they are tough to remove and so we've let them be. But this long hard winter damaged a bunch of the plants and trees in the yard and we had an arborist come out and take a look to see if any could be salvaged. They couldn't. So we started thinking about making the yard ours more or less. We wanted a more edible landscape and the junipers were in the way.

After much thought we hired the arborist to not only remove the winter damaged things, but to take the juniper out as well. And now it is gone forever! Since then we've planted some peonies and have ordered some blueberries, raspberries, a mulberry tree and an Italian prune tree. Also some strawberries...things are looking up. We've also planted rhubarb, pea pods, butternut squash and both sweet million and tiny yellow pear tomatoes!

I also got wild and crazy and decided I wanted a small perennial garden in the back near the patio to attract hummingbirds. I've seen a few of the little beauties around and want to encourage them. One of the great delights in our house on the rez was the abundance of hummers drawn to our flowering baskets on the porch...I wanted to recreate that if I could.

So I bought a delphinium, a bee balm and a foxglove to get the ball rolling. In mentioning it to the neighbors in one of the above mentioned gab-fests I now also have some gorgeous lilies, a hardy fuchsia and a cute hummingbird feeder, all gifts from the yards of our neighbors!! So this morning Ralph and I took up a bit of the tiny lawn in the back yard and put in the beginnings of a nice hummingbird garden. I still want to add a few things and some sort of water feature and the requisite edging bricks so Ralph doesn't get overly carried away with the weed-eater, but I'm pretty happy with the progress so far.

And I'm really happy that we live in such a friendly and generous community!!