32. Dear Neighbor
“Greetings neighbor! If you need help in this crisis we are right next door.”
Recently there’s been a lot of news about states relaxing stay-at-home orders, about non-essential businesses reopening. Yet we know that our lives will continue to be impacted by the coronavirus for many months to come, and that there’s no “getting back to normal” anytime soon—assuming that such a concept is ever possible. A question I’ve been mulling over, one that I think is worth asking: Do we want things to go back to how they were? Or do we want to build something new?
In times like these, our survival instincts kick into high gear, leading us to prioritize self-protection, sometimes at the cost of human connection. But around the world, we’ve also seen people prioritizing their communities—reaching out in kindness, giving to others in need, finding ways to connect, sometimes across great distances.
Those acts have also happened right next door. When I was staying at my parents’ house in upstate New York, our neighbor left a tupperware of corned beef and potatoes at the kitchen door on Saint Patrick’s Day. A few days after that, when I spiked a low-grade fever, only to discover that every pharmacy and store was out of thermometers, a family friend stopped by to drop one off.
Maybe most moving of all was a note we found in the mailbox one day from someone we’d never met. It began, “Greetings neighbor! If you need help in this crisis we are right next door.” They went on to give their contact information, offered to run errands and share their toilet paper and hand sanitizer, and be a voice at the end of the line for anyone feeling lonely. “Together we will get through this,” they wrote. “We will continue to hold you all in prayer and the light.”
Prompt:
What does it mean to be a neighbor? Have there been moments where you fell short of your ideal? And then the opposite—where have you seen people step forward as the world stepped back? Start today’s entry with: “Dear Neighbor.” Tell them about what you’ve witnessed and the kind of community you’d like to build.
*Bonus points if you actually send a letter to a neighbor*
Alejandra Redondo
Location: Mexico City
About: It made me reflect a lot about my neighbors, and how they became more important, the meaning of community.
Age: 30
Querido vecino: Ha sido una grata sorpresa ver cómo en tiempos de crisis, las caras solidarias no sólo son un manifiesto en las redes sociales, sino que me las topo al lado del interfon, en papeletas con información dispuesta para ayudar a los más vulnerables. O el grupo de amigas que salen religiosamente a caminar y platicar, guardando distancia para no abandonarse. O todos los enamorados de los perros que a través de ellos socializamos, y ahora siempre nos preguntamos cómo estamos. O María Luisa, que de manera paulatina se fue haciendo nuestra amiga y ganando nuestro afecto. De ella estamos pendientes, incluso mandamos pedir galletas para su cumple en cuarentena. Ahora los vecinos son las únicas caras que vemos, y aunque antes pudiéramos considerarlas poco relevantes, son el recordatorio de que hay gente allá afuera, viviendo lo mismo que nosotros e inventándose sus nuevas formas. Como el vecino que extiende una toalla en el pasto para leer el periódico, o Inés, que además del paseo con sus amigas, ahora sale a pasear a su “nieta” canina con la nuera con la que antes no se llevaba tan bien. No sé si sea una buena vecina, aprendí a ser mejor gracias a lo sociable de mi mamá, pero de ésta quizás podamos llevarnos la importancia que tiene el humano con el que nos topamos, en el presente, entendiendo que tenemos nuestras propias personas favoritas, pero lo importante que es la que tenemos al lado. Nunca sabemos cuándo va a ser decisivo ese sentido de comunidad, lograr su estrechez nos va a hacer sentir más acompañados, es otro tipo de amor no condicionado, es mostrar que en medio de lo peor siempre queda alguien que te tendería una mano.
Rosie Fea
Location: Queenstown, New Zealand
About: In January, our 84-year-old neighbour was killed in a car accident across the lake. As soon as national lockdown began 2 months later it seemed I was entertaining ideas she was kind of still there in some way - that this pandemic cancelled out the reality of her actually being gone. Your prompt couldn't have come at a better time! With more time to think and talk, it would have been ideal to speak of said things in the letter, sitting in the sun on her balcony as we often did...but not often enough.
Age: 26
Dear Neighbour.
Feeling gratified and a little patriotic after an evening saunter. It had just gone twilight so I put on Grandad’s old polar fleece and walked the front track. Watched leaves float on down from the branches that were quivering excitedly in the wind, fronds nodding in endless greeting as I passed them by. I stopped in the forest that connects Bay View to Oregon Drive and stood motionless under a vast buttery-yellow leafed tree, observing the sounds and signs of life in there. There were bunnies playing freeze when I looked across at them, blackbirds bathing in small sodden puddles of water at the bed of the bank, and a family of Piwakawaka wending neatly through the web of branches, curiously venturing close to my face in fleeting moments of bravery.
Out the other end, neighbours were congregating on camp chairs around a homemade fire drum positioned in the centre. As I continued home I witnessed two further caul-de-sac get-togethers, and a man out tinkering with a decrepit old fishing boat parked in the drive - light on in his workshop with shelves of lubricants, glues and various other handyman ephemera, a radio playing the Maori National Anthem. To fully appreciate what an integrated, humble and pleasant nook we grew up in now, in an age of pondering the future and what value rests in community and safety, is filling me with so much thanks for these streets.
Dear Neighbour,
So much more than neighbour or name. I know you’re no longer privy to our out-of-order human plight, but incase you are nosey to know more than you can witness up there in timeless space let me bring you back to earth for just a second. Specifically, in response to this prompt - the nature of neighbourhood comradery, and departing from crisis.
I snuck into your house the other day and surveyed your bookshelves. I believe we can see, and perhaps further unpick, a lot of a person with just a peep at their literary sensibilities, even after they’ve gone.
Only, what I saw left me so aware of the cracks in my neighbourliness.
The conversational territory wide open for roaming I never had the valiance to bring up, let alone conceive of your special interest and useful contribution to the matters. I wish to ask you: how did love feel when it came to you, and how did it leave holes when it was taken away too soon? What got you through the years of solitude as a widow? Or perhaps, as that’s when we met, you bandaged your heart and poured your affection onto us as we grew. Maybe this is what community is…. Not just bound by blood ties or immediate relation to tragedy, but adaptive as it transfigures and takes on the shapes it needs in order regain itself and find new raison d’etre?
I wish you could see the autumn we’re having. The novel life of peace and sedation – you would have loved the scenes from your sponge seat the past five weeks. Across the limpid boat-less lake, only a few cars wending the road every hour or so. I’ve watched across and thought of you, convinced this is the memorial space you deserve. That road for a time not a mere causeway for travelling A to B in forgetfulness of your final moment, but now more eerie, sentimental, sacredly held as the silence gives more weight to the thought of the journey.
I wrote the words above on a walk last Friday night, which I guess you could say expose my intentions and longings for a resolute definition of community. But more than that, looking at them now I’m reminded of your canny knack for such keen observance of the ordinary too. A day last year in particular - you telling me of your practice at saving bumble bees. The endearing routine that followed after you’d placed them on the top rung of your balcony, shaking their rotund and fuzzy torsos, twitching their hinder parts, preening and waxing their wings in a gesture of repeated shoulder rolling. Who else would have, or more so take, the time of day to indulge in such evidently minor detailing. But it’s funny – in light of 2020 it seems you had it right. Like Anne Morow-Lindburgh in our shared favourite book looking at the small channeled whelk, the moon shell and finding lessons for life, your habit of pausing and looking - be it at a bee, for the subtle change of note in a violin concerto, the missing letter in a game of scrabble, the uninterrupted phone call as you sat undividedly speaking to whoever it was you spoke to most mornings in the sun - would have found you most apt and unperturbed in the face of this new rhythm we’ve stepped into.
……….
A familiar looking woman arrived on your deck as I wrote. I find it curious, your house standing there as you left it, all of us knowing you are no longer a part of it but all of us no less tending our commiserations with unanswered visits. She came and left quickly, but it’s still stirring in me. Are we like guardians of your world now? Sitting here in the lounge room, privy to the knowledge of who comes and who goes? Mum still waters the plants on your terrace every other day,
* She reappears, sees me, suspends her movement up the steps. She turns, chagrined, back in the direction of arrival and aborts mission.
No! In my mind I run after her. I explain I am not here to judge and please come back and please have your experience and please feel your hurt unguarded.
I had a dream a few nights ago where I very cavalierly announced to Mum and Dad, peering across the way, “Oh look, she’s back!”
You, not her.
You were tending to your normal daily tasks over there and it was a relief knowing you had finally decided to return from your long, unannounced holiday to nobody knows where.