#a concerningly empty bank account after all the bills | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

drafty-castle · 6 months ago

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I’ve said before but I moved from southern USA where urban sprawl has eaten everything to northern Maine where everything is vibrant Green or sparkling White depending on the season. No billboards. Minimal urban sprawl. A “large city” is the equivalent to a medium-small town in Georgia/Tennessee.

Beautiful.

Is it for everyone? No. There’s little to no entertainment that you can’t make yourself, everything closes at eight or ten (including Walmart and McDonald’s), and unless you live downtown in a city or town with local access to necessities the need for a car is dire because the nearest anything might be fifty to a hundred miles away.

But the people are kind. Not nice in the Southern sense. There’s little chitchat between strangers or automatic smiles and politeness. But there is a deep seated culture of kindness and community support. Not necessarily in the financial sense (though there are a significant amount of aid programs that just don’t exist in the south available here), but in the “stranger-helping-a-stranger” sense. I think it’s due to generations of people knowing it could be their car (and before that, horse and buggy) on the side of the road during a snow storm needing help and so people automatically go out of their way to help others in kind. No questions, no expectations, sometimes not even an introduction! Just, “Hey! You stuck? Want me to hitch up your car with my winch? [gets car out of snow ditch] All right, see around. [drives off]” (True story)

It’s a complete culture shock compared to living in the parts of the South I come from, where people are polite to your face but more likely to turn their eyes away from anyone needing help or blame misfortune on God’s judgement or just watch in glee and gossip but not help. I’ll take standoffish but genuinely kind over polite but selfish any day.

Places can be beautiful and I enjoy looking at that beauty. But people can make someplace so much more than just pretty to look at. Having both in one location is sick a blessing.

#brought to you by a storm throwing my breakers and killing both my single widow A/C unit and my deep freezer at the same time #a concerningly empty bank account after all the bills #not getting paid at all for a week next pay period because I’m my wife’s full time care giver and she’s in the hospital for a week #in the EMU for a EEG/epilepsy monitor and insurance won’t pay me whole she’s under doctor’s/hospital care #and in response a local who refurbishes appliances and didn’t even know us offered to sell us both a referb A/C and deep freezer at cost #the man doesn’t even know us. we’ve never met. we’re don’t even live in the same town.#he just saw 🌻’s FB post about it and offered #we moved up here for a variety of reasons but one of them is because heat severely affects both of our medical issues so not having any A/#in our room can be deadly and there’s hundreds of dollars of meat and veg in the freezer that we can’t afford to lose #from my experience of living in the south I cannot imagine someone going out of their way for a stranger like this #not to say it doesn’t happen #just not in the community and culture I grew up in and remained as an adult #Maine #community #community support

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