I haven’t listened to it in years, but a podcast episode I still think about is “The Living Room” by Love and Radio. I remember listening to it on I-5, over the sound of my windshield wipers while driving north through the Chuckanut Mountains, and wiping my own tears away while a woman recounted her oddly sweet, but one-sided, relationship with her neighbors and her grief over its end (I won’t spoil the ending, but it is sad).
I thought about that podcast episode a lot during the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic when we stayed home, and the few blocks of our neighborhood became our daughter’s whole world. I thought about it when our next door neighbors went on a backcountry camping trip that summer and I realized how much I missed listening to the sound of their coffee grinder through the open windows in the mornings while I sipped from my own cup, how much their routines had become a reliable and companionable part of my own daily doings. I thought about it when I’d catch sight of my daughter standing on the bench in front of our window, nose pressed to the glass, watching our neighbor across the street puttering beside his cat in his garden.
And more recently, I thought about that episode while writing my latest column at Catapult, which is a bittersweet (more bitter than sweet) look back at what pandemic parenting revealed about the conditions of motherhood in this country and a reflection on what I’ve learned from mother trees and their networks of community care (and so, of course, more than a little bit about neighborliness).
I live in a neighborhood that’s old, but not on the historical register. That’s got a mix of single-family homes, rentals, duplexes and apartment buildings. That’s as marked as any neighborhood in this country by the inequities of housing policies past and present. That’s impacted by the housing crisis. That is all true.
And, at the risk of sounding completely earnest and a bit like Mr. Rogers, what’s also true is that I like having neighbors. I like living in proximity to other people. I like setting our waste bins and recyclables out on the curb, side by side. I like waving while coming and going, I like my one-sided observations.
I like knowing my neighbors just a little and entirely in fragments. I like knowing their first names, but never their last, and the names of their dogs, what time they start their cars in the morning, the parks they walk to in the afternoon, and where they do their shopping. I like hearing their instruments and the smell of their woodsmoke and their suppers simmering on the stove. I like watching their packages arrive, which is almost as exciting as when the FedEx truck pulls up to my own curb.
I like that one of my neighbors is nearly always dressed in purple when I see her, and she wears a gardening apron around her yard. I like that another neighbor works at the food bank and doesn’t wear his helmet when he bikes to the market. I like how our next door neighbor once asked when our children nap so he can practice his drumming without waking the baby. I like how another neighbor uses a ramp to help their senior dog out of the car after a hike, and another makes ornate lawn sculptures and sells them at a pop-up market at the gas station, and another uses reflective insulation in the windshields of their vehicles even on partly cloudy days. I like the packs of students that walk by carrying backpacks and instrument cases and that at noon an elderly man walks with his leather briefcase from the bus stop and another wears sneakers and has long phone conversations while he does his power walking. I like how one neighbor’s front window is filled with hanging plants. I like that another has six chicken figurines in her yard and that my daughter counts each one as she pedals by. I like that a neighbor recently stood in front of her house decorated with holiday lights to take a cell phone picture of it at dusk.
I like that I hardly know any of these people, and yet the smallest details of their lives have become meaningful parts of my own.
What do you like about your neighbors? And, if you care to, you can read my latest at Catapult, here, and let me know what you think.
If you’re looking for some holiday gift ideas for yourself or someone you love, here are a few small, good things…
🍃 A magazine subscription to Loam or Mother Tongue. These print publications are thought-provoking and design-y. They look real good on a coffee table, but they are also worth reading cover to cover.
🍃 A book of essays that will inspire a loving, reciprocal relationship to the natural world, like this one or this one.
🍃 Some seeds for planting when spring comes. I love growing these extra ruffly champagne hollyhocks and these luxuriously fragrant sweet peas.
🍃 A guide to visible mending, like this one or this one, plus a sashiko-style mending kit and an online workshop for getting started.
🍃 An illustration that honors the simple pleasures of taking a solo swim or hiking with small children, or an art print that recalls the synchronicities between our thumbprints and tree rings.
🍃 For the astrologically inclined, a subscription to the CHANI app.
🍃 A copy of Brandi Cheyenne Harper’s Knitting for Radical Self-Care. For an advanced knitter, a Mother Knitter gift card to go toward a complicated but dreamy Petite Knit pattern. For someone who is curious about knitting or just getting started, a kit from We Are Knitters.
🍃 And, a few of my favorite goods from locally-beloved small businesses: a calendar or print from the Phoebe Wahl Shop, some simple gold hoops from Baleen Jewelry or this coastal ring from Material Wit, a woodsy candle from Handmade La Conner or scented veil spray in my favorite fragrance blend by Sea Witch Botanicals.