Who are the people in your neighborhood?

It's like Mr. Rogers sang -

They're the people that you meet
When you're walking down the street
They're the people that you meet
Every day.

Before this past weekend, I could not tell you what many of mine looked like, what their names were, what they did for work or hobbies or any other number of basic identifying features. But while we were shoveling and snowblowing and commiserating about our lost power and the dropping temperatures in our homes, we became neighbors, and not just strangers living next door to each other.

Praising gas stoves for working without electricity, we ate pasta and meatballs together after a morning of shoveling and marveling that yes, the snow was still falling. We advised people trying to get up the small hill at the intersection to "keep going!" "don't stop!" so they would make it up and over... and when they didn't listen, we pushed their cars or shoveled out their tires.  We started calling ourselves the West Street Avengers, helping a half dozen cars or more.

It was like this article says - you bond in the work needed for survival (a relative term, of course, since our physical labor only resulted in freeing our cars and avoiding fines for not clearing the sidewalk unlike our ancestors).

And of course, since this sense of community, however intangible, has real and lasting impacts on a neighborhood's health outcomes, it's in all of our best interest to more frequently pretend that the power is out, there are many feet of snow on the ground, and we're all in this together.