A love letter to my neighbors in a small town
November, 2023
On an early summer morning in my new neighborhood, when my two boys were already riding their bikes about the gravel and purple chalk was already rolling down the driveway, my new neighbor Terri snuck through the line of pine trees that separated our two homes to say good morning. Her smile was cautious, and our small talk was brief.
“So, where is your husband?” she chortled, innocently, neighborly, inquisitive.
That month prior, he moved out, I told her. Without a neighbor noticing that he drove away along the country roads with no street lights, he left what would no longer be his home. Only I would see the bright stars at night now – the Milky Way hazy across the sky like the smoke trailing from a secret cigarette late at night – and the neighbors were none the wiser that my household had one less.
Fear came next. As I filled the spaces in my home where my first husband used to be, I longed for company. Maybe a relative would show up with banana bread and reassurance, maybe a friend would call to listen. But, for as much as external validation temporarily pacifies a wound, it’s the embrace of an environment around you as you make peace with your solitude that cures.
I found my hug in a nearly invisible town in the southeast corner of South Dakota, where the stop signs are scarce and the lone gas station across from the greasy bar is also a grocery store, a pizza delivery, an ice cream parlor, a donut shop, a pharmacy, and an afternoon candy fix for the middle schoolers who walk there from school. The retirement home welcomes trick-or-treaters every October, the lifeguards lather sunscreen onto the elementary kids during their 10-minute pool breaks in mid-summer, and the football field every fall is lined with the entire population, which stagnates around 600 neighbors, all of whom you know by heart.
And this was unexpectedly my safe space over the next four years. More safe than the reason everyone moves to a small town in the first place; safe in a way no one even knew they were hiding me.
We moved there abruptly. After purchasing land atop a bluff just east of those Friday night lights I could see blazing after a long week, we hurried through blueprints so the boys could begin their education in a small town only to choke on a dissolving union and an omnipresent apprehension while picking out backsplash tile and door handles.
“The big city is too stressful, too crowded, too loud,” we reassured ourselves as a pandemic loomed. We had a responsible plan until we shouldn’t have, a failed gambit in haste.
Then, when he escorted himself away from the plan as suddenly as it commenced, I surprisingly sought out a neighbor to tell me I did the right thing, and I admit I felt panicked: Why did I come here in the first place? I’m alone here – but they only listened, and that gave me my answer. They didn’t pry or judge or scold, or laugh or condemn or shun me away back into the asylum of my new home now more hollow by the hour, a tabletop set for three. They were the ones who showed up, with the banana bread I needed and more often cucumbers from their gardens. They had no idea I was crying in my bathroom ten minutes prior to their knock, but they were happy to see me, and I was relieved to see them. How nice of them to stop by today, I said to myself that night.
Unceasingly, my neighbors pulled out of their garages at 8 a.m., mowed before sunset, waved as they walked their dogs unleashed, invited me to barbecues in the middle of the street, and pushed the snow off my driveway before I awoke to the winter mornings. I didn’t even know there was that much snow to be moved, but they had the tractors and the weather trackers, and they did.
They knew it all for me; they kept me safe and sound – the way you love another.
When an elderly neighbor was sick, I looked up a coffee cake recipe to bake and deliver. A sullen husband answered the door. I spent a good 30 minutes sitting in their living room, trying not to look too closely, and we got to know each other in a way that made me want to see her again. Their photo albums were on my lap, we toured their bookshelf twice and played on the floor with their Dachshund named Ivan. Ten days later, her husband called to tell me she died, and then he said after that, “She loved your coffee cake, thank you.”
Two houses down from him are Sandie and Gerry, older neighbors who like to ride bikes and fix our kickstands and demand my boys wear helmets. To this day, the boys insist on remembering to grab them, “Just in case Gerry drives by.”
Heather shares her sourdough loaves and has a husband who still plays baseball for the small town 10 miles south, and Davis and Carrie have two loud dogs and a third baby on the way. The oldest isn’t even five. Lisa runs a daycare, Nate is a retired vet, and Terri – my Terri behind the pines – is a master gardener, a painter in her basement, and one of my closest friends who waters my flowers when I’m away.
Two days after Terri prodded in my driveway, I snuck past our shared pines for more solace. She was tending to her garden as always, and she dropped her pruning shears and muddy gloves to come in for a tight embrace, the one you need from a mother.
“I’ve been married three times,” she said, one of the first things I ever learned about her. “Who cares what other people think! Do you want to come sit by our fire with us later tonight?”
I brought a bottle of wine and a blanket for when it cooled down, and I did.
With neighbors, you develop an expedited kinship the way you start confiding in a desk mate at work you wouldn’t otherwise ever be friends with. If this is who surrounds you, this is who you love, and you never overthink this.
We show up for our neighbors as fast as we would a family member. We prioritize our Saturday nights for them and are more vulnerable in their doorways than we are at family reunions. Our neighbors keep our secrets while our families shame them. They are the friendships we never saw coming and the ones we never feel obliged to keep. But it’s the love and affinity you end up needing and feel lucky to have found, and it is next door.
My entire life and future – as well as that of my children – shifted tremendously atop that windy ’ol bluff and within that little town I will always feel is mine in some way. It’s mine because it was a steady, reliable corner of the world to begin trusting myself and trusting the people around me, without anyone watching. Everyone knows most everything about most everybody in a small town, but they protected me anyway, accepted my boys anyway, and for this I am grateful. I broke and healed while they were across the street or picking up their kids after school, too, their mere presence the net they weaved under me as I free-falled into something new.
The community you seek – or the one that sneaks up – will always have their arms open, and this is why we gather.
I’m remarried now, to the one who moves the snow along with me, and together we gaze up toward the Milky Way on clear nights. We rebuild and make new spaces and ask what the other might need. I am not safe because of him – I was not safe because I had a neighbor – I am safe because we make each other feel safe together, in the same way a community simply ends up protecting each other, despite whether we know what we are protecting each other from. You just hold tight and trust.
My two boys were held, too. They got off the bus to a familiar school every morning, with familiar faces that showed up even when they never asked for it. Their school invited us to music concerts, to Monday night board meetings and to help with concession stands at volleyball games. We visited the kids for lunch and drank from the mini milk cartons, and they stayed for dinner at their friends’ houses on Friday nights. All together, we were infallible, undamaged, and loved.
As the years ticked quickly forward and one harvest after another clouded the fields in our backyard at the start of every school year, I realized what my neighbors might have known all along: Just like me in my corner, they were fixing themselves, too. Just as I needed them to go on with their daily routines – reassuring me that life indeed keeps moving, no matter how much your breath might catch – they needed to watch me cut my growing grass, too. We needed to see each other near.
We seek when we don’t even know what we are seeking, we lean into that which we are yet to trust. And then we exhale and figure out how to impart the trust onto another, the way we pass around the cookie platter from neighbor to neighbor every Christmas.
Our lives are never unchanging. There will always be unexpected newness, a need for a visitor more than you might admit. But this is how a community rescues, this is how you settle into something different: You look out the window, and you wave.
