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Woman, 88, waved to students from her window for years. They gathered outside her home for one final goodbye


Tinney Davidson gave her neighborhood 12 years of warm hellos. And now that she is moving to an assisted living facility, they got together to give her the sweetest surprise goodbye.

Davidson, 88, moved to Comox, British Columbia, with her husband in 2007, according to CNN’s news partner CBC. Their home was near a high school, and every morning the couple would wave to the students passing by on the way to school. She developed a friendship with the students, and some would come and visit her at home, CBC reported Friday.

She continued the morning ritual even after her husband died. “I just liked the look of the children and they all looked in and I thought, ‘If they’re looking in, I’ll wave to them,’ and that’s how it started,” Davidson told CBC.

Davidson will be moving to an assisted living home, and will not be able to wish the neighborhood students well as they make their morning trek to school.

So last week, hundreds of students carrying signs and flowers walked together to Davidson’s home, stood on her lawn and blew her a collective kiss as she looked on from her porch, CBC said. They carried colorful signs adorned with love hearts.

“We love you Mrs. Davidson,” one sign read. “Thank you for being awesome.”

Davidson sat on a rocking chair, choking back tears as she waved back.

“I was shocked again that’s there’s so many kids that want to say goodbye to me,” she said.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.
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