It hit me the other day when the four of us were in the kitchen: when my husband made a lemon meringue pie for my auntie’s birthday, he used lemons from one neighbor’s backyard and homemade vanilla extract gifted from another neighbor. When I sifted a batch of kombucha from the big jar where it’d been sitting for eight days into air-proof bottles, chunks of passionfruit from another neighbor’s tree (along with a healthy spoonful of sugar), joined forces.
“It’s like we’re all coming together!” I whispered to no one in particular, although I think Rufus the dog flapped an ear in agreement.
The truth is this: I’m fascinated by those humans we call our neighbors.
Sometimes we share walls, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we share fences, other times acres upon acres of land separate us from the people nearest the places we call home. Some of us live in dorm rooms, others in homeless shelters. Some of us make our home in a tent on the street, others in a broken-down minivan on the corner of Bancroft and 73rd Avenue.
Where it is that each one of us calls home, we find ourselves surrounded in one way, shape, or form by our neighbors.
And with these people, whoever they are, wherever they are, an opportunity to know and be known presents itself in return.
James (my husband) and I have called many places home in our thirteen years of marriage: Brisbane, San Francisco, Pacifica, and Oakland parts I, II, and III in California. Seattle in Washington. Before the two of us tied the knot (and after I’d left the college nest), I lived in three different houses in Scotts Valley, California, two different apartments in Auburn, Washington, and then places in Hillsborough, San Mateo, and San Carlos, California.
If you’re counting, I’ve called fifteen different places in two different states home in just over twenty years. That’s a lot of neighbors.
While the details of the first few years are rather blurry, I still hold within me a story of a neighbor in each place. Because in those places, those people changed me.
There was the Russian couple in San Francisco who led us into their living room and fed me tea when we were robbed. There was the whole block of Wesley Avenue who came together for front yard celebrations, just because they liked being around each other. There was our trifecta of a shared driveway in our last house; although the neighborhood got “much, much quieter” when we left, I’ll not soon forget how they came around us when our world was thrown upside-down.
And there were neighbors Mark and Steve, some of our neighbors in the first place James and I ever called home. Our friendship started when Mark voiced his discontent that the Hot Guy down the street had been taken.
That Hot Guy was my husband.
From then, a friendship birthed, mostly through our dogs. Eventually, Mark (and his husband, Steve) became our people: when we had that ugly robbery in the city, just as the Russian couple took us in while we waited for the police, Mark came over that night to give Canon a bath and do things I couldn’t yet do, because I was still shaking. When our world was thrown upside-down several years later, it was like his Cara-sixth-sense kicked in. He happened to call, just because; a few days later, the boys were on a plane down to Palm Springs to stay with Uncles Mark and Steve for the week. That was something they could do, so they did.
We’ve celebrated Thanksgiving together, we’ve eaten Easter meals together. We’ve stayed with them when we needed a respite (and increased their preferred household volume exponentially). We’ve done a lot of life together.
What an honor it’s been to call them neighbors, and eventually, to call them friends.
I suppose that’s what I want in this neighborhood, too. I guess that’s what I want for each one of us, wherever it is that each one of us calls home.
This, of course, is the challenge: not everyone wants to know and be known in return. We have our people, and our people are not those with whom we share a fence.
But sometimes, it happens. Sometimes it works. Sometimes neighbors turn into friends; you start a Garden Club, and they give you lemons and you give them beets, but really, you’re giving each other something so much bigger than a small bounty of backyard fruits and vegetables.
You’re giving each other life. And that’s worth everything.
Question: Who are your neighbors to you? Who are you to your neighbors? How have you seen someone be a good neighbor, literally, to the people around them?
I’ve got two books on my stack that I’m really excited to read about this subject: The Great Belonging by Charlotte Donlan and Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves by
. Have you read either of these books?Completely unrelated,
and I are gearing up for another writing workshop. Join us on February 16th for Upcycling Words that No Longer Fit? It's going to be a good one. Hope you can join us!
Love this whole post.