During our 50-plus years of marriage, Pam and I have been blessed with some pretty nice neighbors.

In Enderlin, North Dakota, it was Duane and Jill Dick, who taught us how to play pinochle. We reconnected with them a few years ago.

In Waterville it was Dick and Deb Chambers, the couple who had introduced Pam and me to each other back in 1971. While Dick has passed away, Deb remains a dear friend.

In Tyler, it was Jim and Carol Kopel, our next-door neighbors for 23 years. They also remain our very good friends to this day.

And then there are our next-door neighbors in Blue Earth, for the past 17 years – Don and Fran Beckendorf.

Once again, we had hit the neighbor jackpot. We hit it off with Don and Fran right from the get-go. I think they were pretty happy that we were doing a lot of upgrades to our house and to the yard, some of which was basically a shared area between us.

I would often give Don a helping hand with something he was doing if he needed some help. After I worked on my yard and he was done working in his yard and garden, we had to have a beer (or two) on his deck. Fran and Pam would share some wine and discuss flower topics.

Don would tell me stories about his life, like his time in the armed forces in Alaska, how he and Fran met, teaching in Blue Earth, and in Clara City before that. I really liked the story about his next-door neighbor in Clara City who forbade him from working in his yard on Sundays.

There were some really great stories, and I, of course, love listening to people’s stories. It is what I have done for a living for over 50 years.

Don would tell me about the things he liked best about teaching, and the things he did not. Seeing a student create something out of wood and feel good about his or her accomplishment was the best thing.

He showed me around his wood shop behind his garage and some of the kits he had made…one for each student to work on in shop class.

Over the years, he told me lots and lots of stories, and of course, he might have retold me the same stories a time or two, but that was alright.

Don liked watching me do projects in my yard, like building a fenced in patio, or building a new deck. He would always come over and do some inspecting, to make sure everything was straight and true.

When I tore some temporary steps off my deck and replaced them with new ones, Don asked if he could have the old steps. I said “sure.”

He turned those steps into a solid wood bench that he put near his garden so he could sit and take a break from working in the garden.

In recent years I started helping Don with projects at his house, helping plant the garden, and mowing his lawn for instance.

I also had to start helping him when a ladder was necessary. He had been banned from using ladders after a ladder he was on slid sideways all the way off the side of the house to the ground.

He still snuck into my garage and took one of mine to use when no one was watching. Soon both Fran and Pam banned him from using any ladders, his or mine.

During the winter months it was a little tough to sit on the deck and drink a beer, so I would go over to Don and Fran’s and visit them from time to time, just to see how they were doing. Sometimes Pam would go with me, sometimes not.

Don and I would talk a lot about sports, especially Twins, Vikings and college basketball Final Four tournament action. He loved to watch sports on TV. His knowledge of sports was amazing.

Every once in a while, when I was visiting, we would go on a little tour around the house because he wanted to show me something.

The house is amazing, because it is filled with beautiful furniture and other items that Don built himself. And the wood work in the house was fabulous. A large built-in unit in the dining room which Don had made, held lots of beautiful treasures Fran had collected over the years.

We got to know some of Don and Fran’s family, and they got to know some of our family. That is especially true when our son Nate and family were living in Blue Earth with us, when Nate was working for Seneca and was either waiting to buy a house or just ready to sell his house.

Don would later always ask about Nate and his family and how they were doing, since he got to know them pretty well.

I shared a beer with Don that Nate had brought from Wisconsin, a New Glaris beer called Dancing Man. Nate and I thought it was the worst beer we ever tasted, but Don choked it down and declared it to be “not bad.”

And then there is Don’s sister. One day I looked over at Beckendorf’s deck and there was a woman who looked just like my mother, Natalie. My mother was living at Southview Estates in Blue Earth at the time.

I wondered how in the world my mom had gotten over to Don and Fran’s deck, and was she lost and trying to find my house?

When I went to investigate it turned out that it was Don’s sister from Fairmont who was visiting them. She did bare a remarkable resemblance to my mother. After that, Don always referred to his sister as “my sister who looks like your mother.”

There are other neighborly stories I could tell. Like the neighborly Tupperware exchange. You probably know how that goes yourself.

Pam would put some rhubarb dessert, made from rhubarb from Don’s garden, into a Tupperware container and we would take it over to Don and Fran’s. Fran would eventually return the Tupperware container to us, but it would not be empty, it would be filled with some other treat. Or vegetables from the garden. Fran liked to bring us okra and kohlrabi from the garden, some of her favorites from growing up in North Carolina.

You can read a lot more about the Beckendorfs in the amazing obituary elsewhere in this issue of the Register. It was written by their daughter Kim.

As you can tell from all these stories in this week’s Editor’s Notebook column, we are going to miss our neighbors. Truth is, we were already missing them because they had moved to a place in Savage. We went and visited them a few times there over the past months, but it was not quite the same.

Still, Don shared a lot of stories with me when I did visit. And yes, some were repeats.

It was still a shock to learn both of them had passed away, in less than a week apart. Yet, somehow, that seems fitting for those two, as they didn’t like being apart.

Last week Register reporter Kevin Mertens wrote about neighbors. This week I seem to be doing the same. You probably think there is a theme going on, and maybe there is.

The moral of all this is that if you ever have some really good neighbors, you should be thankful. And if you ever have some really great neighbors, you should feel blessed.

I feel very blessed.