Once a Reston resident: April 2009

When I came in after my kayaking trip this afternoon, I sat down to check my email. I happen to check the Weather Underground site and found that Reston was flirting with 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

I immediately got a flash back to some springs long ago when Northern Virginia would have a couple of weeks of spring weather and then go directly to the miserable summer heat that often engulfs the area.

While I managed to several of these years almost without spring, they were never fun.

First off I was usually stuck in a suit during the worst of the heat. I can even remember hiking the tunnel to the Pentagon on one particularly nasty day when the temperature reached into the nineties and the humidity made the walk almost deadly.

Of course the city air is filled with heat and some fumes which does not help the situation. It does make you really appreciate air conditioning. I know that I would come home and get out of my suit and into shorts as quickly as possible.

Since I am not longer with Apple, I am a little luckier, starting in March my work uniform as a Realtor on the NC Coast switches to shorts. While Reston and other inland spots are cooking in spring heat, we are enjoying a climate cooled by ocean breezes which will also warm us in the fall.

This is a great time of year along the coast. We even took our boat out on Friday. It proved to be a great day. Perhaps spring will try to take hold of Reston's weather once again. But unfortunately, I suspect heat will be a way of life for the DC metro area until next winter.

I checked the Restonian this evening and was surprised to find a story about a murder in Reston. It made me think back to this afternoon when I was standing on a deck watching waves crash into the beach here on the North Carolina coast.

While waves cannot wash away crime, but they certainly help to soothe the modern mind.

I always felt very safe in Reston. I am not sure why since it would be a rare morning that you could not hear sirens somewhere in the background noise.

Maybe I felt safe in Reston because the news in the Washington Post overwhelmed anything that might have happened in Reston. Also news in a modern community like Reston does not travel by a grapevine. A lot happens that you never hear about personally.

If a crime takes place, you likely will not find about it unless the police knock on your door and interview you to see if you know something about it.

Here in the world of small towns on the coast, news does travel by grapevine. We were driving out of our subdivision this afternoon as one of the children of some friends was walking home from the bus stop. She flagged us down to tell us about an outside light fixture catching fire on a neighbor's house the previous evening.

We live about five houses away but heard nothing, certainly not the fire truck. We continued on our journey to my workplace to check my snail mail and got another version of the story from the daughter of the 88 year old lady who lives in the house.

When we returned home, we were flagged down by yet another neighborhood youngster. In the space of a couple of hours, we heard three versions of what happened.

The first thought might be that so little happens here that anything is exciting news. There is a certain amount of truth to that. However, our neighborhood would be much more connected than a Reston one.

Some of it just has to do with numbers. Our little piece of heaven, Bluewater Cove, only has forty two homes. While we do not know everyone, we know several folks well and many others well enough to strike up a conversation.

It is a completely different world than Reston. There is a fair of community interaction here, and some things happen that are unlikely to happen in Reston.

This past weekend, I was backing out of my driveway as my neighbor was mowing his yard. I motioned to him that he could just take his riding mower over and do mine while he was at it. We both laughed, and I headed on out not thinking any more about my joke.

When I came home late Saturday evening, the joke was on me. I was surprised but not shocked to find that he had mowed my yard. Not many people have neighbors who look after each other like some do in our subdivision.

There is a pretty good support network here. Finding someone to check on things or feed the cat when we are out of town is not very difficult. We often have to worry more about whose feelings we might hurt if we do not ask them for help.

Big cities like Reston are great in their own right. Usually very good jobs are available, and you do not have to worry about everyone knowing your business. Every service known to man is usually available.

But we all those services and people comes some less desirable people and certainly more crime than we would see in our rural area.

Living in a peaceful rural coast area is pretty easy on the nerves. There is a good deal of comfort in knowing that we live in a much smaller community where people have the time to get to know each other and perhaps keep an eye on those who need watching.

I suspect the 88 year old lady who had a total stranger bang on her door and tell her that her house was on fire appreciates his efforts almost as much as those of the neighbor who went to his own home and got a hose and put out the fire using another neighbor's spigot well before the fire truck arrived.

Sometimes it is good to be out in the boonies near those waves. For a story of some friends visiting us on the coast check out this post, On Being the Local Experts For Visiting Friends.