Knitting Into a Neighborhood
Opening the door to needs and gifts
I’m preparing for a move in mid-August (20+ boxes of books packed so far; yes, we promise to tip the movers generously). I’ll be a little slower here as we pack and unpack, but the impending shift also means I’m planning how to begin weaving our family into a new neighborhood.
We have some connections to the community where we’re moving (that’s part of why we’re going!), but we want to be attentive to how we can be accessible to our new neighbors. We want to be part of, as O. Carter Snead terms it, “the network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving that must exist for any human being to survive and flourish.”
Covid deepened our connection to our neighbors. Everyone experienced a shared crisis; our needs were known and similar; and, initially, we couldn’t rely on help from travelling family—we needed the people nearest us.
During the first wave of covid, I wrote a piece titled “Locating Our Invisible Wounds” for Comment about the blossoming of local ties of need and how to sustain them when the crisis ebbed:
In the grip of the virus, our collective suffering is unchosen, forced on us. In the days and months to come, we have a responsibility to retain the present sense of compassion, which means “to suffer with.” As stores eventually reopen, and parks fill again, we have to remember and seek out the people whose need was particularly acute in the pandemic, but for whom “normal” is still a slow-moving disaster.
Part of the work is a matter of individual initiative—we have to practice not averting our eyes from suffering, from vulnerability. In small moments, in our daily lives, that may mean not turning away from a homeless person. It might mean saying more than “It’s not polite to stare” to a child interested in someone with a visible disability, and instead finding a way to teach them that averting our eyes from someone vulnerable can be as bad as gawking. We need to tutor our interest, so it can grow into love, rather than curdle into an idle curiosity or atrophy into apathy.
In the piece, I talk about our town’s mutual aid network and the listserv I set up for our block. In our present rental, we’ve benefited from a small neighborhood group chat. The people in our two or three blocks are all in a WhatsApp group (and one of the neighbors made sure to apprise us when we moved in).
It’s a small, casual messaging group. We’ve asked for help (repeatedly) in storing things from our freezer in other people’s houses when our fridge kept failing shortly after our new baby was born. Someone asked for a teaspoon of dill for a new recipe (I could never stick to only a teaspoon!). Sometimes people even just send a heads up that the sunset is particularly lovely.
Today, people have been discussing plans to take turns offering the mail carrier frozen gatorade or water now that the heat index is over 100 degrees.
It’s the smallness and the casualness that fosters asking, I think. The person asking for dill isn’t reviving a silent thread—she’s one of many participants in a conversation. When I posted to ask for crutches for my husband after a sprained ankle, multiple neighbors asked if there was anything else we needed or checked in when they saw us outside.
Little requests and responses build up the reflex to make a bigger ask. A shared space for conversation makes it easier to expect you can bring a heavier burden to your neighbors, and they might find a way to spread it across several households.
Our new neighborhood has a few listservs already running, and we have a date marked to bake cookies and invite people over. We know a little about one neighbor (keeps bees, contributes honey to a meadery), but most of our block is dark to us so far.
We have a back patio, not a front porch, so we’ll need to create our own opportunities to be visible and interruptible by our neighbors.
I second many of the ideas raised below - gardening provides so many opportunities for reciprocity (Would you like some cucumbers? Could you water my plants while I'm gone next week? etc) and just being outside is a huge one, it removes the literal physical barrier of knocking on the door to converse. I also recommend hosting a National Night Out / Night to Unite gathering (happening August 2nd! It's not too late!) and sending holiday cards to everyone on the block, both of these have worked for me. But I really want to answer the last question and tell the story of the nicest thing my next door neighbors have done for me.
Seven years and one month ago I was (heavily, visibly) pregnant with twins. We were delighted and so were our elderly neighbors, who had warmly welcomed us to the block with cinnamon rolls when we moved in about 9 months earlier. My water broke at 34 weeks and off I went to spend a week in the hospital, returning home a week ahead of the two preemie babies that I left behind in the NICU. I hobbled from the car to the house on my husband's arm and I saw our elderly neighbor out watering her plants. I knew she had seen us but I avoided eye contact because I was sad and in pain and just wanted to be home. About 10 minutes later we see her drive away (this was at ~8PM on a Saturday night and she's in her 70s, this was atypical behavior) About an hour later she knocks on our door. I go to hide out in the bedroom (see above re: sad and in pain, I was not prepared for company) and ask my husband to answer the door. When she leaves I come out to see a basket on the table; a card, some gift cards to local restaurants for takeout dinners, and, most amazingly, 4 pints of perfectly ripe, absolutely heavenly July raspberries. After a week of hospital food I ate a dish of vanilla ice cream topped with those raspberries and I will never forget how they tasted or how loved I felt. I've thanked her and her husband many times since then, but that's a gift that I want remembered :-)
When my neighbor's dryer broke, she asked me if she could borrow a drying rack. I said yes, and feel free to bring your clothes over here to use our dryer if you want. I repeated the offer and she finally took me up on it after the new dryer delivery was delayed. (She has five kids and that's a lot of socks!) She thanked me, but I thanked her because I told her the fact that she used our dryer makes it easier for me to ask when I need something. Sometimes asking for help is as important as offering it.
I recommend gardening for being visibly available! I chat with my retired neighbor mostly about gardening because that's what we're both doing when we see each other. When we're traveling, I sometimes ask him to water my garden. It's an easy way to help each other out when you don't know each other very well, because you don't need to give out your house key.
We don't have much of a front porch, so we just got some lawn chairs. Lately I've been spending a lot of time sitting in the front yard reading while my toddler drinks from the sprinkler and points out all the babies and doggies that pass by.