Acts of Kindness in the neighborhood

Retirement Blues

When most people retire they find something that makes retiring worthwhile- something that keeps one not bored.
For Ed Reid, it was a simple answer: help others. How exactly? By putting those skills, he has learned in the many decades that he has worked. Those include cutting and pruning trees, yard work and clearing snow. In other words, he is an amatuer landscaper.

Making up for the mundane.

Many of these tasks seem mundane and small but it all adds up to a bigger picture. While he mainly does trees during the summer and fall, in the winter he is mostly clearing snow. He does this using his snowblower to maximize efficiency. While today was merely his neighbourhood, he has done a handful of other services. This includes his local church which he helps around season since the pandemic hit two years ago. This work went from everything from helping mow their front lawns and pruning trees that were dangerously close to the church itself.

The drive to keep going

Ed says that the biggest thing that keeps him going is the people who appreciate him, especially those who are non-able or retried like him. From his perspective, the work he does is vital because it provides services that normally wouldn’t happen if it was a company or the city ” The issue for homeowners, when they are retired and on a fixed income- [is that] they can’t afford em”.

Reid  makes sure that for those less abled that there is extra care made into the work he does. Ed recalls one time when he helped a retired couple in which the husband was really sick to help keep their spruce tree and the woman gave him milk and cookies after his work was finished. While this work can be hard and when it comes to tree cutting potentially dangerous, these moments make the whole thing pay off “That’s my kick outta doing the work, – is that people can’t afford to have you know 300 dollars to do the work”

Ed said he will keep working until he is either unable or “ is in a pine box”. Joking or not it showed me that he is dedicated not only to his work but also to the people he gives his services to. I even got a course on how to properly plant trees when I was interviewing him. Best of luck to Ed and his endeavours for the community.