Friday, November 1, 2019

Parting Is Such...





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.






4 comments:

  1. What beautiful memories, Linda. Thanks for sharing!

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    1. Thank you, Carolyn! Isn't it a privilege to come across so many different people in our lives?

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  2. What a lovely story. We all wish we could have great neighbors, and though I've had good ones, after reading this story I feel even more fortunate that many of ours have stayed on our block for nearly 20 years, the entire time we've been in our house. Thanks for the comforting thoughts you've released in me. I wish you more permanent neighbors, who are fascinating to know and are just as fascinated to know you and your family!

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    1. Thank you, Deborah! I'm so glad you've enjoyed the company of such good neighbors for so long!

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