My neighbor across the street from me and I share ingredients, baking pans, etc. And yeah, sometimes we send the kids over to get the items. Most recently she needed a bundt pan to try a new recipe. No point in her buying a pan just to try a recipe, so of course I lent her mine. I was rewarded with a nice big slice of super yummy bundt cake.
I can’t recall any such incidents since moving to urban Montreal circa 1976, but prior to that in the suburbs west of the city… I guess it might have happened.
I live in the western Montreal suburbs, and don’t remember it ever happening here. Though, like I said, I was born in the '80s.
Well, Pierrefonds is practically a free-fire zone these days, wot?
We just never did it here in Pierrefonds.
My neighbor and I usually borrow coffee from each other, because it’s 2 miles to the party store and it’s $8 tiny cans of coffee.
In the 70s and 80s in suburban Houston, we did it all the time- my mom would send me running across the street to get a half-cup of sugar or the like. And my friends across the street would show up for the same kinds of things. And the dads wouldn’t so much loan tools to each other as help each other out on projects all the time.
Now that I’m older, it doesn’t happen as much- part of it is because I can just go up to the 24 hour Wal-Mart that’s 5 minutes away, and part is because the neighborhood isn’t as close as the one I grew up in.
I suspect it’s because there are far fewer children and the residents are farther apart in age; when everyone’s between 23 and 30 and everyone has a couple of kids born within a 2-3 year period, there’s a lot of common ground, and the children playing together and going to school together brings the parents together as well. OTOH, when you’re in your early 40s with a kid and your neighbors are in their 60s with grown kids, or are in their 30s with no kids, there isn’t as much stuff in common that would make you interact.
Not that I recall. But my neighborhood had the appropriate perspective on neighbors.
Neighbors were not people you knew and interacted with, they were a buffer between you and the people you knew and interacted with. I know my parents generally knew the neighbors but any relationship was limited to a “hey, howsit” if you happened to be out in the yard at the same time or maybe an “I’ll be out of town for a week could you call the fire department if you notice the house burning down.”
There was also not lending of household tools, either. If you wanted your lawn mowed you could pay a kid with access to one to do it for you or go buy your own.