We live on a quiet street in Philadelphia.
This morning, we were inside, having our martial arts lessons run by Rodney Nobles, our Martial Arts instructor who drove up from Delaware to be there to spend some time with us. My husband, Millard, is a high-degree black belt. I started studying martial arts with him when I was 70 years old, and I am now 84 and still taking lessons. Normally, we work out in our living room and have our marital arts lesson virtually. But this morning was different; Millard had a competition planned for this coming Saturday. So we wanted to get a good workout with our instructor, and Rodney agreed to come here to Philadelphia for an in-person lesson.
My husband practices his martial arts quite vigorously. On this morning, he was doing his Kata and that involves some yelling, of course; as you strike a blow, you signify your effort with a yell. There was a lot of noise involved during this session.
All of a sudden, we heard a commotion from outside. We didn’t know whether it was a doorbell or a sound of some unusual thing, so we went out to see what had happened.
It was two women, our neighbors from across the street.
They had been loudly calling out and were very concerned and were about to call the police. They had heard the yelling and thought someone was in our house harming us. They were scared. We realized that with all of the publicity that was going around about the shooting of the children in Texas, people are on edge. People here are scared and worried about their living environment, we are all wondering if someone could cause harm in our own neighborhood.
Of course my husband explained to the women that he was in the process of having a martial arts lesson with his instructor. He introduced Rodney to them and eventually the neighbors were satisfied. And they left.
After the lesson was over, we decided to go and once again meet with the women to assure them that our martial arts lesson was on the up-and-up and that we were in accordance with the rules of the neighborhood. We then realized that this was just one more consequence of COVID life: we’ve never really met our neighbors since moving here several years ago. We’ve waved to each other, but we’ve never been officially introduced and exchanged information.
Since that time, we have tried to get to know the people in our neighborhood better. I sit out on the front veranda, and introduce myself to people walking by. Millard, who does all the gardening himself, has decided to give away a lot of our plants; he puts them on the sidewalk, and our house has become known as the place to come to get plants. Neighbors see me out there every day, associated with the best-looking garden in the neighborhood.
And we have made a lot of friends that way.