We've lived on the same street for 29 years. Same sidewalks
and oak trees. Magnolia, plum, maple.
This is nice.
The hard thing about staying in one place for so long,
though, is that most of the people around us don't stay. They need a bigger
house or their rent is too high or they decide to try cohousing or move to
Bali.
Which means that we, who are rooted here, are always saying
goodbye and goodbye and goodbye.
The little house next door to us was just sold, and we
parted with another set of neighbors. They weren't family or close friends. We
never sipped cocoa together after raking leaves or toasted the new year in
together. And yet we lived in such close proximity that their faces and voices
and the bark of their dog (Tony!) and the color of their winter coats remain
firmly present in our consciousness.
Maybe we'd all be surprised if we knew the effect we made on
those around us. Here's an excerpt from an essay I wrote about another couple
who once lived next door to us.*
Arcadia
When we met our new neighbors we couldn’t believe our good
fortune. Allie and Jay were young and attractive, with sparkling personalities
that filled the air with a champagne fizz.
Our family had lived in their house for ten years before we
moved to the Victorian next door. We’d sung our babies to sleep there, and in
its yard there grew the columbine, coneflowers and chrysanthemums we’d started
from seeds, as well as the apple tree my grandmother had given us.
The embodiment of joie de vivre, Allie and Jay seemed to
love the house too. They made wine from the grapes that grew along the fence
and filled the rooms with books and thrift-store furniture as well as the many
friends they entertained. Whether the occasion was a birthday or an evening of
reading Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia aloud, the sounds of their company – car
doors opening and closing and hearty greetings and laughter – became as
familiar as the horns of the trains that run just a few blocks away.
Although they both worked and went to school, they also made
time for our children. Jay awed our son with stories about playing Bernardo in
an amateur production of West Side Story, and our daughter, who rarely deigned
to talk to adults, confided in Allie that her stern second grade teacher, Mrs.
Young, pronounced her y’s as h’s.
“Mrs. Houng!” Allie laughed, and our daughter laughed with
her.
The couple had a similar effect on my husband and me. We
soon discovered they were also Jane Austen fans, and a
neighborly “hello” in our driveways could turn into an energetic conversation
about the likes of Mr. Darcy or Captain Wentworth.
At the peak of our friendship, Allie and Jay had us over for
dinner. It was the beginning of autumn, but still warm enough to eat outside.
They set a ping pong table decorated with white candles and grape vines on
their brick patio, and as we ate herbed chicken and apple cake I knew we were
in Arcadia.
Then one spring day our neighbors told us their news: Jay
had been accepted by a medical school in another state. Even as they began
packing, we already missed hearing Allie's stories about her beginning tap
class and the sound of their party music dancing over the fence. We couldn't
hold onto them, but we could hold onto the house. When we offered to buy it
back to use as a rental, Allie and Jay gleefully started packing their books
and booze and knickknacks.
They left on a July afternoon. Our stoic daughter insisted
she wasn’t sad, while our son fought to keep his face composed as we watched
the couple hop into their U-Haul, faces beaming with the thrill of a new
adventure.
The next morning I opened the gate to their backyard. Since
I hadn’t been there all spring, I was surprised by what I found. The grape vines
grew unchecked, reaching for a telephone wire, while the asters I’d planted
when our son was a baby were bursting like purple stars, and the branches of
the apple tree were bowed with the weight of the most abundant crop of fruit
I’d ever seen. Best of all, a large plot where we’d once grown tomatoes was now
a sea of leafy vines, sprouting dozens of trumpet-shaped blossoms and
green-striped pumpkins. Poking their heads up between the broad leaves were
slender stalks of calendula topped with yellow-gold blooms, while tangled
trails of orange and crimson nasturtiums wound around the edges of the garden
and into the rosemary and lavender bushes my husband had put in years before.
I ached for Allie and Jay – because we’d longed to know them
better and to be known by them. Still, I marveled at the riot of color we’d all
created. Our neighbors' leaving had hurt more than our family wanted to admit,
but how good it was to be alive and aware of the depths of our hearts.
*"Arcadia" first appeared in the 2010 TAWK Press anthology Seeds
of....
The names "Allie" and "Jay" are
pseudonyms.
