“We were so glad to be invited!” the woman I’d just met told me. “When we moved in, I wasn’t sure if we’d be part of a neighborhood or not, since our house is on the main road.”
I knew what she meant; five years ago, when we began settling onto this street that ends in a cul-de-sac, I hoped it held a promise of new and genuine connections, but I couldn’t be sure.
The fact is, when you’ve ever experienced true neighborhood, you know that living with a not-neighborhood is just plain unsatisfactory, if not downright bleak, depending on how much community you might have elsewhere.
Martha and I were mingling at a recent party down the street, one my husband and I could walk to, carrying our pot of chili. My neighbor Jane and I cooked up the idea a couple of months ago, and she gamely offered to host; she and her husband were accustomed to making generous gestures like this. Everybody had a good time that evening—you could just tell from the buzz in the room. In true potluck style, the table was covered with delicious and varied dishes, just enough hot and hearty and enough cold and crunchy, too. Some people had known each other for years, raised their kids together even; others were meeting for the first time. I loved how we distributed invites not only up and down our own street but also to homes on two nearby roads; thinking a bit expansively, we counted them as neighbors, too. Why not? One of my new cherished friends lives across the main road, nestled in above a huge field which she and her husband encourage us to enjoy; she is about 25 years younger than I am, soon to have her third baby. At the party, we chatted with people we’d seen regularly out our windows, walking their dogs—we’d just never had face-to-face time. We had proximity going for us, and that was an excellent ice-breaker. “Where’s your house?” Heck, if we found we liked each other, we could pretty easily get together again.
I grew up the youngest of five kids, and my older brothers constantly had friends over to play sports on our front field. My mother would sometimes rap on the window to say, “Keep away from the house!” but she and my father were glad to have a whole bunch of boys around, I think. And then of course their parents up and down the street became bonded, too. Collectively, they made up a good portion of the attendees at my home wedding. Regularly rubbing shoulders was the way in so many neighborhoods…alas, less so now.
Surely in any era, most of us— not all, admittedly— crave this kind of trust, this kind of regular contact close to home.
So why is it that we increasingly slip into a way of life which includes many hours sitting in front of a screen, rarely seeing our neighbors for longer than the fleeting moment when we might wave from the car with windows rolled up? This has become a normal way of life, perhaps — the way we hunker in our own silos with our important tasks — but it’s undoubtedly a poorer one.
Here’s an image from my childhood that I love. It’s not a picture from my immediate neighborhood, exactly, but maybe just a short two miles away—the bandstand down in our village park, at the end of Main Street. Here, throughout the summers, the community band would play on Thursday evenings, and everyone you knew and many you didn’t (yet) would spread blankets out to listen, and to be together under the stars.
I don’t recall that these lights went up at Christmastime back in the old days, but now when I visit during the holidays I see them glimmering. To me, they say, “Never forget the kind of illumination, the soul-bathed-in-light quality that neighborhood can provide.”
This year, after the inevitable family dispersals that post-Thanksgiving brings, I’m grateful that we managed to work in our local potluck before Turkey Day. Now, rather than think of that event as already faded in the past, I plan on noticing which of my neighbors — names recently learned — are, in fact, still around.