I was fortunate to grow up in a neighborhood of loving and caring people. Daily interactions with them were the norm, and each of our neighbors felt like an extension of my family. For as long as I can remember, there was never a creepy or shifty individual on the street.
One of the reasons for our daily interactions was that several households had children, all within the same age range. We often walked together to and from school. My brothers and other neighbor boys played on the same baseball teams. We all shared the same sidewalks for riding our bikes. And my family’s house sat on two large lots that kids viewed as a public park where they could gather for play.
A comforting thing about my neighborhood was that the mothers always looked out their windows, monitoring their children’s whereabouts and behavior. All our mothers were friendly with one another and took turns watching after us. Having a block full of mothers also meant you didn’t act up. If you did something naughty, someone would catch you. Though that could sometimes be a pain, it also made you feel safe.
Adults in our neighborhood were generally close. Folks sat outside on porches or visited in the street. Someone was always near to help if you needed a ladder, a cup of sugar, or an extra pair of hands to help with a task. There seemed to be this unspoken code: living in that neighborhood meant a commitment to be friendly, live in sync, and love thy neighbor. Though people did move in and out or die over the years, incoming families all tended to adopt the same attitude. As my parents aged and became more housebound, neighbors who had been around for decades helped look after them – shoveling their walks when it snowed, sharing plates of food, mowing, and checking for activity and safety.
My neighborhood now is also friendly but different from my childhood neighborhood. People are generally more withdrawn but sometimes look up and nod at one another. Two neighbors will walk up to the property line and visit briefly with us, and one time another neighbor came to the door to offer us some surplus sweet corn they’d grown.
A few weeks ago, a “derecho” with hurricane-like winds greatly damaged our community. On my street, the winds snapped a powerline in half, causing a giant fireball, then an electrical outage to 10 of the 13 residences here. Tree limbs flew everywhere, and it seemed as though the storm would never pass. But when it did, I looked out the window and saw all the neighbors gathering in the street to check on one another and survey the damage. It was a very moving sight. People cared about one another, even if they didn’t interact frequently. People seem to have become friendlier over the last few weeks, still talking about the storm a bit.
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to form friendships. Small gestures can mean so much. When I was a girl, there was a widow – Mrs. Van Tuyle, who lived a few doors down. She was quiet and kept to herself, but she chatted with my mother occasionally. I remember playing on the sidewalk before Mrs. Van Tuyl’s house on a sweltering summer day. To my surprise, she opened her front door and said, “It’s awfully hot out. Would you like to join me for some lemonade and cookies?” I was stunned. She wasn’t a stranger, and yet, I didn’t really know her. I said, “Sure,” because I knew it would be okay with my mom. Mrs. Van Tuyl led me to her patio, where we enjoyed visiting over lemon sugar cookies and cold glasses of lemonade. She was a lovely woman, and I couldn’t understand why she would reach out to me at the time. When I finished my drink, I thanked her and said I’d better go, and she told me to tell the other kids I played with it was okay for them to stop by too. Later when I told my mom about what happened and asked why Mrs. Van Tuyl would do that, Mom said, “She’s lonely.” I was shocked because, at that point in my life, it never occurred to me that adults could get lonely.
After that day, I always made a point to wave to Mrs. Van Tuyl. A few times, I even left her a May Day basket. And when I was around 12 years old, she and Mrs. Sonderager, another elderly widow in our neighborhood, started asking me to run to the nearby grocery store to pick up some items for them. Running these errands for them was my first paid employment. In high school, I began to think of my forthcoming independence and started a “hope chest” of things for my future home. I decided I needed to collect some recipes to learn to cook, and I knocked on Mrs. Van Tuyl’s door to ask if I could have her recipe for her Lemon Sugar Cookies because someday, I would be grown up with my kids, and I wanted to make them. She became teary and said, “Oh, aren’t you sweet,” and invited me inside while she jotted the recipe down.
Mrs. Van Tuyl is now long gone, but after 50+ years, I still have her cookie recipe. It’s always been a favorite, as is the memory of sharing ice-cold lemonade and sugar cookies with a lonely neighbor. You can find Mrs. Van Tuyl’s Love-Thy-Neighbor Lemon Sugar Cookie Recipe in the Activities section of the blog. I recommend you serve them with lemonade and share with a neighbor, especially any neighbors you have yet to get to know. And under Recommended Reads, you can read my review of The Neighbors, written, and illustrated by Einat Tsarfati.
Little Seeds Read 