On the State of Neighboring

Out the open screen window, I see signs of summer’s end coming to our town in southwestern Ohio: brown grass and two of my boys dressed in school uniform, leaning over our rusting wrought-iron fence, the five-year-old waving some dollar bills in the air. Despite fall’s chill in the air, they think they’ve heard the ice cream truck.

At the door, my baby is diaper-clad only, yogurt residue chalky on his chin, the bacon grease on his fingers being transferred inadvertently to the glass of the screen door. I’m clearing the dining table, cleaning the end-of-day kitchen.

One of my boys runs in to tell me that there’s a lady who wants to talk to me. I believe in neighborliness. I’ve tried to order my life around it. Still when I hear this, my reaction is visceral. My heart jumps, then falls to my stomach, where it kicks up dust and startles the butterflies—just for a moment—before my mind tells my body that there’s nothing to fear and that I should of course make time and welcome whomever it is here to see me. A knock on the door is a rare enough occasion that it feels like an event.

This time it’s a neighbor I do not know. She is almost 19, just starting nursing school at the local community college. I’d seen her sign in the yard, “Class of 2024,” some months ago when summer was still young, and noticed cars lining the street for her graduation party. Yet something about the way she carries herself seems less senior summer, and more mid-life matron.  

“Do you do childcare?” she asks.

She’s likely seen our six children running about and assumed so.

Her mom is crossing the street now, a tall woman with long hair and smart-looking glasses. They both work, and they need someone to get five-year-old, we’ll call him Greyson, off the bus and keep him until dinner time. Greyson is the son of a family member; a complicated history is alluded to, involving mental illness and heartbreak.

“It takes a village,” the daughter tells me.

“We moved here a year and a half ago,” her mother says. “And we don’t know anybody. I don’t even know how to talk to anyone anymore.”

She worries that she comes off “too abrasive,” like her people-skills have atrophied. (Since COVID? Since moving? Since the tragic death of her youngest son? She doesn’t specify.)

I tell them that I’m sorry that I never made it over to introduce ourselves. The thought of making cookies and knocking on the door had occurred to me multiple times, I say, but “life gets busy” and “then I felt like it was too late because you’d been here so long.”

They nod knowingly and gesture to the house across from theirs, its exterior coat of naval paint on-trend, its porch sign of welcome, the cushioned chairs in which I’ve never caught anyone sitting. “I tried to say hello but now it’s been a while since they moved in and it’s awkward,” the daughter says, of the residents across the street. She knows the feeling.

When my husband and I moved here in 2012, that was the house with all the front porch activity. Wanda, whose daddy had built the house in the 1930s, grew up there and now sat on her rocker as the matriarch of the family. A revolving door of adult children, grandchildren, boyfriends, dogs came to stay. Room could always be made in the attic, or the detached garage. After her death, the house decayed, the porch life ceased. The remaining couple with children—Wanda’s stepson and his girlfriend and their two kids—couldn’t keep up with the property taxes. The county auctioned it off. A real estate company bought it, gutted it, sold it.  

The decline of neighborliness and social trust across America is well-documented. It’s hardly newsworthy because most of us know it so well from our own vantages. Recently I was walking the block as the sun set. All was quiet but for the crickets and katydids, and the occasional revving of a distant bike. As the sky grew gray and porch lights came on, television lights flickered from the windows. I thought about all the people on the street, self-contained in their box-like houses in front of their box-like screens. There’s an illusion of self-sufficiency, until a concrete need arises.

It strikes me that Tim Walz’s “golden rule”—“mind your own damn business”—doesn’t work for people with dependents.

I remember my own challenges last year with finding someone to get my son off the bus. There was the time I forgot to make arrangements and got a string of calls from the understandably perturbed driver that she’d been circling my street now for 15 minutes, waiting for me to arrive to get my son. When I did arrive, disheveled and apologetic, I noticed a neighbor on the far end of the street, perched on her porch looking my way through binoculars.

For a mother or a father to keep a job or to go to school requires an interdependent network. (Did my 18 year-old neighbor really just tell me, unprompted, that “it takes a village”?) And as Leah Libresco Sargent points out, since we were all once children, we all have a responsibility to children. My retired neighbors graciously took up that responsibility last year, getting my son off the bus when I couldn’t, spoiling his dinner with Oreos and Chips Ahoy, Sunny-Delight and Kool-Aid Jammers, teaching him card games, and making him feel really special.

Our alienation from neighbor is not a story of deficient goodwill, but a story of competing goods. In the 1960s Joan Didion wrote an essay about the eccentric business magnate and film producer Howard Hughes, who was “the largest single landholder in Clark County, Nevada.” An acquaintance once remarked of him, “‘Howard likes Las Vegas… because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich.’” Didion observed that:

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

We want to escape the gaze of neighborly binoculars. Yet it’s this same drive that leaves us alone, more often than we would like—more often than is good for us.

Now, as I stand here talking to Greyson’s aunt and grandma, I feel this tension. I want to return the favor that I received last year. I want to get Greyson off the bus and help them out. But we’ve got our schedule; the kids have their activities. I’m pulling up my Google calendar and trying to figure out how I could make it work, maybe at least one day a week. What would have to give? Something would, not the least of which are my personal freedom and privacy.

The song of the ice cream truck turns out to be real—it’s upon us now, and our conversation is broken off when I notice that my five-year-old has escaped down the sidewalk in his black socks, no shoes, and is now at the stop sign, standing on tiptoes to hand his dollar bills up to the man in the truck. He comes running back with two ice cream sandwiches tucked under his arm.

Greyson comes out of his house and runs across the street, too. My boys look at him, in awe that someone their age lives here. Just a few houses down. Who knew?