What do you remember from the summer of 2016? Perhaps a tumultuous election season. Maybe it was a summer of new jobs, weddings, graduations. But, for one New Jersey woman, she’ll remember it as a summer where her life was changed.
The Hamilton Township Neighborhood
When Adam and Kristin Polhemus moved into their new New Jersey neighborhood, they could be forgiven for not being aware of their neighbor. Anne Glacey, who gave her age at “about” 70, was a rather reclusive woman. “Until my wife and I moved in, no neighbors had a conversation with her,” says Adam, a police detective. “She had no relations with anyone in the neighborhood.” But eventually, Glacey warmed up to the Polemuses, stopping by often to chat.
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Up To $3,000 A Day
How exactly Adam and Kristin found out about Glacey’s household problems isn’t clear. ABC News reported that Adam and Kristin were informed by the couple who had originally sold them the house. People magazine says that Glacey showed them a letter.
Perhaps both things can be true–before the June 2016 letter, Adam says that the couple had hinted around that they would be more than happy to help Glacey deal with the disrepair to the house, which hadn’t escaped their notice. Perhaps embarrassed, Glacey would always change the subject.
But then, she received the letter. She had a 1984 Plymouth abandoned in her driveway. Her grass was, according to People, three feet. The housepaint was chipped, fading, peeling. Each of these was a separate violation under the newly-enforced Neighborhood Improvement Program. Every violation could net the recipient up to $1,000 per day, per violation.
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“An Act of Love”
According to Adam, after showing them the letter, Anne Glacey despaired: “I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t do this myself,” she told them. For Kristen, the decision to help was easy. “These fines would quickly surmount for anyone in Anne’s situation,” she says. “We wanted to help her out of an act of love.”
Members of the Polhemuses’ church, as well as other neighbors, gathered together to fix the code violations. All these people were volunteers, and paid for their own supplies. And it wasn’t a small project. Kristin shared that:
. . . neighbors shored up the foundation and flooring while others performed structural repair to the side porch. We removed, scraped, primed and painted shutters; and we scraped, primed, and painted the exterior of the home. We helped Anne donate her car and we did landscaping to bring her lawn back to its original beauty.
A Big Change
Ultimately, Hamilton Township erased the fee for the violations. But it wasn’t only the property that underwent a transformation. Glacey served food and drinks to the volunteers. Additionally, she continued to develop those relationships once the work was finished. Glacey was grateful. “I appreciate their generosity,” she says. “. . .really wonderful and thoughtful. Not everyone would arise to the occasion and I am grateful for it.”
Kristin thinks it was all worth it: “Your neighbors are just family members you don’t know that well yet, and the relationship starts with you.”
*Article originally appeared at Healthy Holistic Living. Republished with permission.
