Won't you be....my neighbor

Lori and I are sitting at Panera this morning having a bagel and reading the Sunday paper. A woman walks in the door smiling and mouths "hello." I assume she is looking past me to someone sitting behind me. Lori looks at me and says "do you know her?" I said I have no idea and thought she must have been saying hi to someone behind me. Lori said she was looking right at us. I shrugged and went back to the paper. A few moments later I looked up and there was a man standing with the woman who'd just come in. It was then that the light bulb came on. They were our neighbors who live directly across the street from us. How sad is that. We've lived across the street from this couple for 9 years and I didn't even recognize them.

Of course, after I recognized him I said hello to both of them and said how sad it was when you don't even recognize someone who lives right across the street from you. We all laughed and then went back to what we were doing.

I think it was about a year, maybe 2 years ago, we'd gotten a floral delivery at our house. It was for a neighbor and the delivery person asked if they could leave at our house because the people the flowers were for weren't home. I waited a while and called the phone number on the card of the people who should have received the flowers to see if they could come pick them up. They answered the phone and I gave them my address and they said they would be there in a few minutes to pick up the flowers. A few minutes passed and there was a knock at the door. It was this same guy from Panera this morning. He'd drove up and down our street trying to find our house not even realizing that I was right across the street. Again...isn't amazing how you can live 500 feet from someone and not even realize that you do.

As we walked out of Panera this morning, our neighbors were sitting at one of the outside tables. We stopped and had one of those surface-y 'how's life' kinda conversations. We talked about the weather, our dog, their dog....etc. We bid our farewells and went to our car.

As we were driving home I said to Lori, "we should invite them over for coffee sometime, we know they drink it now!"

Relationships. It means being intentional.