Neighbors

When my husband and I were a young married couple, we had a neighbor who was a single mother and needed a lot of support. She often came over to use our washer and dryer, or just to drink coffee and visit.

One day I hosted a committee meeting for a community group. The members were all older and more affluent than I was, and I wanted them to think highly of me, so I served dessert and coffee on my best china. Everyone seemed comfortable — until my neighbor walked in with her robe on, got herself a cup of coffee, and pulled up a chair.

Once I’d introduced her, she took over the conversation and proceeded to tell everyone about her troubles with her boyfriend, who was a boating enthusiast. She was thinking of breaking up with him, she said: “He never seems to have any time for me. He’s too busy with his boat — and his wife!”

Carole S.
Three Rivers, Michigan

I have good neighbors here in prison, fourteen of them, all living within twenty feet of me. Charles is a black drug dealer from Mississippi; I’m a white lawyer from Memphis. He and I discuss the Bible, his children, and my writing. We condescend to each other, but still value one another’s company. Miguel, in the bunk below me, speaks English slowly but animatedly. He is a former restauranteur who sold cocaine along with Mexican cuisine. Though he’s long-winded, he is also generous to a fault.

I will get out of prison in a few months. My mother has kindly bought me a small house in a respectable, middle-class neighborhood, where I can rebuild my life. She has confided to a select few of my future neighbors that the house is for her son, who is in prison. Undoubtedly her “secret” has since been discussed at neighborhood-association meetings.

I worry: Will my new neighbors ever trust me? Will I like them? Will I feel isolated? I am more nervous about meeting my neighbors in the free world than I was about meeting my neighbors in prison.

John A. Jennings
Memphis, Tennessee

My wife and I live at the end of a dirt road, in a cabin surrounded by the creeping branches of three live oaks. When we first moved here, we bragged to friends about having no neighbors: we could walk around naked and crank the stereo until midnight. But after a few days we realized that we did have neighbors, and they soon let us know who really owns the place: A wood rat occupies our shed. Squirrels use our roof as a runway, their claws screeching against the metal at 5 A.M. Mule deer graze on our herb garden. A skunk with an appetite for vociferous sex lives under our kitchen.

Our neighbors almost drove us back into town. But now, when we visit friends in the city, there’s something missing. These animals remind us that we’re alive, that each moment is an opportunity to howl, or hang from a tree limb, or romp in the bushes all night long.

Paul Grafton
Santa Barbara, California

Kitty belonged to Gladys, who lived next door. Old and scruffy, Kitty would often slink in through my open window and make herself at home. She and George, my big tom, would gaze lazily at one another for a while and then part — much the way Gladys and I did when we visited each other.

Gladys was in her seventies, and the first couple of times I knocked on her door, it took her a while to answer. Eventually Gladys quit getting up and simply shouted, “Come on in!” She was a good neighbor: quiet, unobtrusive, and understanding of our desire to have her trees topped so we might see the ocean. She had only a few guests each year: a sister from Minnesota, a son, a granddaughter. I didn’t visit her often, but I always brought her some of my dahlias when they were in bloom. Each time I visited, Gladys would ask, “Kitty’s not bothering you now, is she?” I’d tell her Kitty never bothered me.

Last winter I realized Kitty had not dropped by for some time. When I went next door to investigate, Gladys didn’t answer. That afternoon I saw a van parked in her driveway. I walked over and asked the driver, who turned out to be her son, if anything had happened to Gladys. He told me his mother had died. She’d been in the hospital, he said.

I was shocked. If I’d known, I would have visited her. Why had no one told me? I felt hurt and left out.

Then I realized that Gladys’s family had no reason to tell me about her condition. I had played only a peripheral role in the life — and now death — occurring on the other side of my property line. I wondered why I hadn’t taken more time to get to know her. Are we all so uninterested in the people who live just thirty feet away?

Jo Nelsen
Pasadena, California

At the age of forty I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic fatigue syndrome. Then my health benefits were cut off. I didn’t know how I would survive, financially or physically.

I found a new living arrangement with a woman named Patty, who had multiple sclerosis. She needed in-home care; I needed free rent. But this home-sharing arrangement took care of only a third of my living expenses.

When my story got out, one of my new neighbors began bringing me food; she told me she volunteered at the Salvation Army, and the food came from there. I gave her a list of foods I ate (I have a restricted diet) and was surprised and grateful that the Salvation Army had so many of them.

Eventually I learned the truth: the food didn’t come from the nonprofit organization but from people in the neighborhood. Each time someone went grocery shopping, they bought a few items for me, which the one neighbor then doled out in small, believable increments.

When they learned that their cover was blown, my neighbors brought their gifts of food to me directly. This went on for six weeks, until my situation improved and I no longer needed their help.

Teresa Verde
Seattle, Washington

After being out of town for a while, my boyfriend Abe and I arrived home to find the dirt road to the Buddhist retreat center where we live buried in knee-deep snow. Our truck got stuck four miles from the center, and Abe hiked to get the tractor while I stayed behind and began shoveling out the tires.

A few hours later, as daylight faded, I heard voices. There was only one other homestead on our ten-mile road, and the residents were rumored to be rough, toothless drug dealers with illicit sexual habits. The voices grew louder, and a group of people came walking up the neighbors’ driveway. I was excited to meet these notorious characters, but nervous to be so outnumbered.

There were three adults and two kids. (Nobody had mentioned kids before.) The grown-ups looked far from rough and toothless and greeted me amiably, offering me a cup of coffee while we talked about snow-removal techniques. The kids both had big blue eyes and freckles, and their apparent well-being made me less wary of the adults. Surely these people couldn’t be drug dealers.

One of the women eventually asked me about our property and what we were doing down there. They had heard rumors about us too. “Yes,” I verified, “we’re Buddhists.”

“Well, we’re nudists,” the woman replied.

Jesica McDonough
Hyampom, California

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