Well, the dust has literally settled on last week’s Extreme Makeover project. What a week! Some of the production crew is still here, cleaning up the neighborhood and they’ll be here until Wednesday. That means in the space of ten days, they came in, completely took over people’s yards, closed off streets, installed security details at multiple checkpoints, set up barricades, parked cars in our yards and oh yeah…….built a house in seven days, working around the clock. I tell you what, though – everybody we came across on that production crew were polite and terrific. They were in communication with us nearly every day on what would be happening, they will repair any damages to our lawn and they even are compensating us additionally for our trouble. Really, it was no trouble. It’s a small price to pay to get that family back together.

The payoff? A teeming crowd on a freezing Friday afternoon, a lot of whom showed up at 7am, all waiting for that limo containing the family to turn the corner onto little Elm Ct. I’d say there was just short of 2,000 people, jammed onto people’s yards (including ours, partially), up in trees and standing on rocks, all to catch a glimpse of a father and husband coming home for the first time in two years. It was pretty moving. I shot some very cool video towards the end that I’ll post eventually.

When the smoke had cleared and the bus was gone, the neighborhood took about an hour to clear out and suddenly, things were relatively quiet again for the first time in a week. Our local newspaper reported in the aftermath that the fundraiser which the town put on resulted in $50K plus for the family. We were more than happy to contribute and clearly many others were as well. Monster.com, Maynard’s largest employer, contributed another $80K to the family and promised a job to the husband when he’s ready. A local landscaping company offered their services for a year – gratis. Even Dunkin Donuts gave the family a free one year supply of coffee. Steph made brownies and brought them to a food drive for the volunteers. Apparantly the amount of food donated was staggering. How’s that for a community? Yeah. We love this town.

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