Bend was different, not so long ago.

In 2004, there were some 62,000 residents. Twenty years later, it has boomed to over 100,000.

Those empty lots, undeveloped spaces that used to be all over town? Devoured by development. Homes are not more affordable. Traffic can be a mummified, Seattle-esque experience. Homelessness has grown. Wildfire smoke and summer are an unwanted, more recurring pairing. Water is a bigger concern. Bend also feels different.

Neither each new day nor every change has been an accretion of bad. The past is not always something to be retrieved. Much has become better, too. There are more places to eat, more places to shop, more parks and a much safer passage on the Deschutes River through town. River flows improved. The economy diversified. Central Oregon Community College and Oregon State University have paths for students to bloom in new ways. Many marvelous people moved here.

We don’t have a perfect parable to symbolize the changes. We did discover a small fraying of connection, among many others as Bend grows.

It involves shoveling snow. The city requires residents to shovel the sidewalks adjacent to their homes. They have 24 hours after the snow stops to clear them of snow and ice. If a city snowplow delivers an unyielding berm of snow onto the sidewalk, there is no loophole for escape.

Some of our neighbors, and probably some of yours, can’t shovel their own driveway, let alone the sidewalk. And sometimes, and it is the best of times, neighbors come to their rescue without anyone even asking.

The city of Bend used to have a volunteer coordinator who people could call if they couldn’t do their shoveling. The coordinator would look for someone to help them out for free.

A certain editorial writer participated from the shoveler perspective. The shovelee was, well, let’s just say she may have been grateful. Her commentary was imperious. It felt good to do it, anyway.

A phone number for the city’s volunteer coordinator for help with snow shoveling was still up on the city website this week. We called it, curious to see if the city still coordinated such efforts, suspicious it did not.

It’s gone. That number was reassigned to another city employee who wasn’t quite sure what was going on. So we asked the city’s communications team what happened.

“When the Volunteer Coordinator left the City in February 2023, we moved to a decentralized volunteer coordination model,” the city’s Jacob Larsen wrote us in an email. The police and fire departments coordinate their own volunteers. The Bend Beautification Program — which deals with litter, removing invasive plants and planting native plants — was taken over by the city’s Transportation and Mobility Department. And so on.

We have no quarrel with that. After our call, the city stripped the help-with-shoveling number from its website.

What of helping people who can’t shovel their snow or pay somebody to do it?

“If a community member needs help shoveling their snow, we recommend that they talk to their neighbors, homeowners association or neighborhood district,” Larsen wrote.

A fair answer. Maybe, it’s not the best use of city resources for somebody to be assigned to coordinate shoveling. And maybe our antenna is overly sensitive to this. Bend aches with bigger ills.

It does mean in this different Bend, when the snow falls, it’s going to be up to you to look around the neighborhood and help if you can. Shovel in hand, you may not be a warrior weaving social fabric. The gift of your labor would be something of that.