Neighbors

Maybe because I've been home so much more, I've been more deliberate about being friendly to our neighbors.  It's a curious relationship, being a neighbor.  You don't choose your neighbors, except insofar as you've been able to choose the location of your residence and that location's rung on our increasingly segregated socio-economic ladder.

But it's different from other unchosen relationships.  You don't have the web of obligation that binds you to your family.  You don't have the need to accomplish tasks that lashes you to your work colleagues.  But you do have the strange intimacy that comes from forced proximity.

I know when the neighbors across the street leave for work and when they return. I know the neighbor next door likes to work on classic cars in his backyard while playing jazz.  I know that the neighbor three doors down puts on cartoons every day after work, and retrieves the paper with his shirt off.

You know mundane details of their lives, and they know mundane details of yours- yet you may not even know their last names.

One of my neighbors knocked on my door yesterday.  Jeannie, from across the street and one door over.  "Is your last name XXX?" she said.  We'd been expecting a digital piano, and it had been delivered to her house by mistake.  She knew my first name because I'd introduced myself once; we're always out  at the same time in the early morning, she walking her dog and me walking... myself.

"Bring friends," she said. "It's heavy."

It was more than heavy.  It was 125 pounds.  My husband and I stashed the kids in the house and entered the relationship armageddon of trying to move something that was far too heavy for us.

Which is when the neighbors across the street drove up (5:45, per the usual).  "What do you have there?" said Dave, whose last name I only learned last week.

He helped us finish dragging the thing up the lawn and into our house.  It had felt odd to ascend my neighbor's porch, and now it felt odd to have my neighbor enter the house, like a violation of some kind of neighborly code: pretend you don't see; pretend you don't know.

I'm thinking about the neighbors over to say thank you.  It will feel awkward, as if we're crossing an invisible threshold.  Maybe we are.