On Our Neighbors' Watch

My best girl and I live on a small street in a "planned community" in the Carolinas.  As we've chronicled here, when not off on any of the various topics that distract me from my actual living, the area is a very "under-construction" one, such that on our street, the longest-term residents have been  here barely a year.  About ten homes, mostly couples, are occupied, and several more are soon to be.

When we got here last March, one of the first things we did was to host a party for the seven couples already resident on the street.  All showed, and we had a great time.  As I have also written in these pages, we have life stories, and since hardly any of the couples really knew each other all that well yet, a lot of fun was had by all in trying to learn about each other.

I'll be honest.  One of the reasons we threw the party that soon was to start something.  I have always maintained that if you want to have good neighbors, the easiest way is to be one yourself -- first.

We moved into a home in Virginia in 1999 in a similarly new street, with mostly people who had just built there.  Shortly after we moved, we had a snowstorm that dumped maybe a foot of snow on the place.  I took out my trusty snowblower I had just bought, and plowed out my driveway and the sidewalk in front of my house.  Since my snowblower was bought at the end of the previous winter in a clearance, it was pretty big -- the only one left in that sale -- and the job didn't take long.

I looked at the snow on the neighbors' driveways and figured that maybe not all of them had snowblowers.  So I just continued down the block a couple houses on each side of the street, and cleared their driveways and sidewalks too.  Took very little time.

It was morning, early, so I never actually saw any of the neighbors.  To this day I wonder if any of them knew who had done their driveways after that storm.  But for the 17 years we lived there, it was the nicest street.  People did for one another and became acquaintances, if not friends.  We were a bit older than some of the neighbors, and younger than others.  We didn't have kids in the house either, so we didn't have that much in common with any of them on a fairy heterogeneous street.

But we were all nice to each other and never had an issue.  We put a sprinkler system in after a year or so, and because of a misreading of the plat, the sprinkler heads on one side turned out to be on the neighbor's property.  It could have been a huge deal, but we just laughed about it, and Ed, the neighbor, sort of thanked me for watering six inches of his lawn.

Cut to 2017.  We hoped the party we held this summer would start a social relationship among the little sub-community here.  There certainly have been a lot of knock-on-the-door visits up and down the street, and it seemed to have gotten a little traction when one of the wives held a block gathering of the ladies last month, and four of the "abandoned" husbands played golf together.

Then this week we got an invitation that made me smile.  One of the couples on the block will be hosting a party for the street for everyone.  We'll all be there, I'm sure, and I believe we have cracked the ice socially, ice that was pretty thin to begin with.

Surely this will recur frequently.  And my best girl and I (OK, she did the work) just delivered fresh-baked pumpkin bread up and down the street for Thanksgiving, still trying to do our part.

Why does this even matter, you ask?  Because I believe that neighborhoods are what you make of them.  Our neighbors in the coming years will need us, and surely we will need them.  Not just in emergencies and for favors, mind you, but because a sense of community is a rock that blesses humankind.  We are not hermits, we are social beings.

We have friends, and on this day after Thanksgiving, I find that it is yet another thing I am most thankful for.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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