Over the last year, Benjamin Olson, 2, and Mary O'Neill, 99, have gone from neighbors to the best of friends.
Benjamin, his parents, and his baby brother Noah live next door to Mary in Minneapolis. The Olsons and O'Neill mostly stayed inside their homes at the start of the pandemic, but Benjamin and Mary started to interact when they were both in their backyards, separated by a chain-link fence. They have since invented a game called "cane ball" – Benjamin kicks a ball to the fence, and Mary hits it back with her cane — and now that he can open Mary's gate on his own, Benjamin regularly comes over to blow bubbles and hand her fistfuls of dirt.
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