Remembering Buddy

Yesterday I was out mowing and as I came up to the blueberry bushes I had a sudden and clear memory of our old neighbor, Buddy. He used to do our mowing when we first moved here way back in 1985. One day that first summer we mentioned to him that a friend had suggested that some of our bushes might be blueberries, and he said "They sure are and they are ripe right now. I stopped to eat some sitting on my tractor when I mowed the other day."

Here's a photo of Buddy the way we usually saw him, sitting on his tractor.




He loved that tractor and he loved to drive around on it, either actually mowing, which I think was one of his favorite things to do, or putzing down the drive to visit his brother-in-law and best friend, Jessie, or over to talk with us. Buddy had worked hard all his life at the kind of blue-collar work that required a quick mind to figure out how things worked and a strong body to actually get the job done. When we met him he was enjoying his golden years on his little country place and he was having a ball. He got up early every morning to work around his yard and garden and drove his mower down the drive every afternoon to Jessie's house where they played pool. In the early evenings he'd open his garage door, get out his lawn chair, help himself to a bottle of beer which he kept in a small refrigerator in his garage, and settled back to relax. It was a good life and he had earned it.

Raised during the Depression, Buddy was the kind of guy who went into the woods to find stakes for his tomato plants and drove to the Eastern Shore to get chicken manure for his garden. During WWII he was a sniper and was part of the force that entered Germany. He didn't talk much about that except to tell us once that he hoped that he hadn't ever shot a woman.

Ben and I were the "new people" in this close knit rural neighborhood. I think Buddy got quite a kick out of us and our youthful ignorance. He practically split a gut laughing when we tried to get rid of our Fall leaves using a wheelbarrow, but when he pulled himself together and suggested we use a tarp, we saw right away that he was right! He enjoyed watching other people work and was quite interested in the improvements we made when we moved in. He often putzed over on his mower to chat with my Dad while he built our new sheds and gave Ben some useful pointers when he built our deck. We always respected Buddy's comments because it was clear, as Ben said, "that he'd done this a few times."



We didn't know Buddy long. Both he and Jessie were cheated by early and quick deaths from cancer. But he was a wonderful neighbor and sometimes I'm struck by the remembrance of him. Yesterday during my mowing I stopped and ate a few blueberries while sitting on my mower and I remembered Buddy. I thought about how the years had passed and how after all this time I still remembered him even though he wasn't a relative or close friend. His enjoyment of life, his interest in us, and his kindness made him memorable. I can only hope that years after I die someone might say the same about me.