Jan Matney has a great post on her blog today, talking about the need to strengthen our communities. I am very blessed to live in a neighborhood that is much like the one she describes (and very different from the series of neighborhoods I lived in as a child). It’s a long post, so I suggest you go read it on her blog. But here’s a few highlights:

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I could go on, remembering Mrs. Black, our eighty plus next door neighbor who, out of sympathy I think, brought me flowers when I was two weeks overdue–and she carried with her a comforting tale about the approaching full moon. Our son was born under a full moon, and I look back on Mrs. Black and see how naturally she shared her wisdom and kindness with me.
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If you think of time as a piece of paper, I suggest that as a society, we no longer have the margins. Dr. Richard Swenson talks about how we can create more Margin time, and he also says that we’ve filled our analogous paper more and more, until we have fewer margins or unmarked, spontaneous time–That makes sense to me, considering the number of two career families, women who work outside the home, overloaded with the second job of housework and childcare, besides the reality of cottage industries seeping into family life.
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Well said, Jan!