Very Neighborly

On one side of The Homestead is a home owned by a couple from Vegas. The owners come to Parowan to get out of Vegas on most weekends (who wouldn't?) and we chat with them from time to time. A couple of days ago, I saw Larry out shoveling his driveway, and I stopped to say "hello." We started talking about heating . . . as in heating our cold houses. Larry told me that they had been relying on ventless natural gas heaters. He took me inside to show me a couple of units. He felt that they were cheap to operate and easy to install. At The Homestead we have a loud gas furnace that inefficiently blows air into every corner of the house, but it drives me crazy cutting on and off every three minutes while trying to heat rooms we aren't using. So, Larry's little one room wall unit looked like it might be something that we could use.

Larry offered to come to The Homestead to look at our set-up and give some advice. We agreed to meet the next day (yesterday). In the meantime, I got on the web and shopped around for the appliance. There are plenty of them available, but none of them were in stock locally. I was thinking that I would need to order a unit and have it shipped. Plus, they are not sold with the gas hoses and fittings, so I would probably need to make a couple of trips to the hardware store to get it hooked up. I was thinking that it would probably take at least a week and a couple of hundred bucks to test one of these things.

So, Larry came over, took a look at our gas lines, gave a few pointers, and then offered to let us try an older unit that he had sitting in his garage. It sounded good to me, and I figured I could go down to the hardware store a few times and try to find the right fittings for it. No. Larry said he had a drawer of old fittings. So, he found something that looked like it might work and brought it over. Great. I figured I could fiddle around with the unit and get it hooked up in a day or two. Nope. Larry came in and methodically fitted up the whole system. It looked good. Well, in a couple of hours, I thought could probably fiddle around with our gas service and get the thing ignited. Umm, No. Larry got the thing turned on and running hot.

What can I say? I had expected to spend money and time messing around with this over the next couple of weeks. Instead, the heater was working great within two hours. This was an act of pure generosity from Larry. He owed us nothing, yet he spent his time and money helping us out . . . and asked nothing in return. It was a humbling reminder to Rural Ways, that a generous spirit is something to be cultivated in our own hearts.