The Boston area was graced with a (moderate) snow storm on Saturday and by now, anyone planning to shovel sidewalks or driveways has done so.
Last night, walking to a Sanders Theater/Boston Baroque concert along a well-known route, I joyfully noticed a couple of first-time-ever shoveled paths, i.e. sidewalks that had never been shoveled in the past. (Inveterate walkers keep track of such things.) And I also saw those little gaps—usually about two or three feet long—between shoveled paths where two, adjoining property owners (or the crew hired to shovel) had just quit: No Man’s Land.
[BTW—and this is probably only interesting to me! Recently during a meeting for worship I realized that when I think “war” my mental image is of trenches and Big Bertha and cratered, barbed-wire covered No Man’s Lands et al, i.e. World War I?!]
These unshoveled gaps used to make me angry. “What’s the matter with these people?” I’d mentally sputter. “Can’t they see where their property ends? I mean, thanks a lot of shoveling what you did do. But now I have to trudge these last few feet through the snow because you’re so clueless?”
But now I’m more, as Dickens would say, benignant. Because isn’t it obvious that our interconnectedness isn’t obvious to most people?
So why not just accept that?