If he has the equipment, the experience or simply the ability to lend a hand, his thinking is pretty straightforward: Why not?
“You go here, you do a little thing here, a little thing there,” Romanello said. “Why not? It’s not a big deal.”
Over the years, however, those little things have added up.
Romanello has called Garwood home for most of his life, first moving to the borough with his family around 1976. He spent some time away before eventually returning and buying his own home in Garwood in 2007.
He has also spent more than three decades working in landscaping, picking up skills along the way in planting, drainage, masonry, concrete work and whatever other challenges a particular job might present.
Those skills have proven useful beyond his everyday work.
Most recently, Romanello helped plant Garwood’s new Christmas tree, using his equipment and experience to tackle a job that required digging roughly four and a half feet into the ground while carefully navigating the utilities around the site.
He has also contributed to improvements at a memorial honoring a Garwood police officer who was killed in the line of duty in the 1990s. Romanello recalled using materials he already had to help improve the area around the flagpole with stone and pavers.
Then there are the less visible acts.
Romanello spoke of neighbors who lost spouses or reached a point where maintaining their lawns became difficult. In some cases, he simply began taking care of the work without charging them.
He tells those stories reluctantly, quick to point out that recognition was never the reason for doing it.
“I didn’t do it for that,” Romanello said. “I did it just to help her.”
Sometimes the opportunity to help is even less planned.
Romanello recalled leaving a job one day when he encountered a fallen tree blocking a long private roadway. A wire had also come down, and residents were beginning to emerge from their homes.
As it happened, Romanello had an electric chainsaw and other equipment in his truck. He and one of his workers carefully pulled the tree aside and cleared the obstruction in about 20 minutes.
Then they went on their way.
It is an approach to community that Romanello describes almost casually. Help when you can. Take care of people. Don’t expect much in return.
But Romanello has also found that kindness has a tendency to travel in both directions.
“It always comes back to you,” he said, recounting times when friends, neighbors and even people he has met through his work have gone out of their way to help him in return. “One hand washes the other.”
That accumulation of small acts recently earned Romanello Garwood’s Community Spirit Award. He said he was surprised as some of his past contributions were recounted, including a few he had nearly forgotten.
His daughter Isabella joined him for the presentation.
“When she’s reading all those things, it made me feel really good inside,” Romanello said. “That I was helping people.”
For Romanello, though, the individual projects are part of something bigger. After nearly 50 years of connection to Garwood, he still considers it a small town, even as new residents have arrived and the community has changed.
His daughter has developed the same attachment. Romanello said she has already warned him not to sell the family home.
That sense of home helps explain why lending a hand has always seemed so natural.
“It’s like your hometown,” Romanello said. “You care about it. You want it to do good.”
And perhaps that is what keeps a small town feeling like a small town: people seeing something they can do for one another and asking a very simple question.
Why not?