My next door neighbor, Charlie, who is in his mid twenties, doesn’t have a snow shovel. He borrowed mine yesterday, but never came out again to get rid of the accumulated ice after that, so my cleared path in front of my house is more like a hyphen between the sidewalk of the empty house on the other side and his walk.

Charlie’s a chatty guy. Lonely, though, I think. His girlfriend still lives in New York City, and he works from home.

His mom bought the house for him; it was a renovated two-story row home that was a rental for a long and miserable time, owned by a landlord who did not give a damn. I told Charlie the other day, when he was taking a walk around the neighborhood with me, that he should look under the siding on the second-floor bump-out some time (I watched the contractors nail it up over disintegrating wood). He said he had already seen some problems.

A new neighbor a few houses down was shoveling when I was; she moved into another two-story renovated row home last year but keeps to herself. Eventually I said, “Hi!” and went back to shoveling, and she said, “Hi!” back. Later, she asked if she had shoveled enough, and I said it looked fine to me. That was it for our conversation. Unlike Charlie, she hasn’t figured out it’s safe to talk to strangers yet. She’ll talk to me eventually. I’ve lived here twenty years. I can afford to wait.

Meanwhile, y neighbor from around the corner, whose name I forget even though I have known her for a couple decades, was out there sitting her car while her kids shoveled another neighbor’s driveway. She called out, “My boys are shoveling. Want them to do your walk?”

“Oh, I just finished,” I said sadly. “Can I pay them to tidy it up?”

“Sure! But no payment necessary,” she said, getting back in her car.

Later, I heard scraping and opened my door. One of the young men in my neighborhood, a slight guy with a nose piercing and dreads, was widening my path, and he grinned at me. “Oh, thank you thank you,” I said.

“No problem, Mama! Any time,” he said. I told him I would be happy to help him if he ever needs it sometime, and went back inside. Later I saw that he had widened my cleared path for me, and had spread some salt.

I don’t know if he’s related to the neighbor who made the earlier offer. Probably. One of the reasons I moved into this neighborhood was that little side street. It’s thoroughly inhabited, everyone is related to everyone else, and there are a lot of kids, and though the great grandmother died last year, they still hang together.

Yes, I talk to strangers. Everyone is a stranger. But I know some strangers better than others, and sometimes they look out for me.