Want to build community? Get annoyed together

Getting to know your neighbors, unvarnished.

Neighborhoods that are enmeshed and happily interact all the time don’t just happen these days. We’ve got more than enough going on that it doesn’t surprise me when someone mentions that their neighbors pull their car entirely into the garage, turn it off, close the garage door, and enter the home via the inside garage door like some kind of anti-socialization airlock. But my neighborhood talks to each other, and it’s almost exclusively because ridiculous, small-scale calamities keep befalling us all.

First, and foremost, it’s the bears. Nothing really bonds a neighborhood like having these hundreds-of-pounds black bears that galumph through nearly daily, dangerous to dogs and children who don’t know better than to get near those paws.

Sometimes it feels like the bears know that just messing things up a little will help us all to bond. So each week, they rummage in our trash cans and either accidentally (or deliberately?) strew piles of nasty takeout boxes and coffee grounds across multiple yards. It’s a bit of roulette, who will get hit, but my one neighbor Kathy seems to get it more often than most.

It puts you in a strangely intimate place, having to feel the twin impulses of “I couldn’t possibly have stopped this” and “I didn’t deliberately let all these diapers explode on your front lawn.” I’ve even felt bad for the bears, the one week that they hit our can the same week that my husband slipped and broke a water glass. I wanted to go out and check that bear’s paws, though hopefully he didn’t dig in hard enough to have the shards get him. Everyone involved got a bit hurt. I’m hoping he just dodged the glass, because he seemed very eager to return to the non-glass-filled garbage the next week.

We’re on the side of a mountain, and for some reason, this has led to nearly every utility provider in our area managing to fail us. A quick scroll through my texts with my various neighbors offers people confirming that, yes, the water is down to a trickle or muddy again, and yes, Mike already called the city department to get it checked out. We networked when our lights were doing some alarming dimming every time we ran the dryer, and did some collective calling of the internet company before a Different Internet Company came into the area and we all kinda collectively decided to convert to fiber, incurring some discounts due to our cooperation with each other. These small irritations didn’t always lead to additional chatter, but sometimes they did. Every little note sent between us reinforced that this was a grooved path, a place we were allowed to walk even when, perhaps, all our utilities were functioning at once?

Of course it cannot stay just the bears and faulty utilities. In a bit of post-moving-to-town psychosis a few years back, I invited many of my new neighbors to my child’s (consults notes) Second Birthday Brunch. He was just busy being 24 months old, but I was over here trying to get to know the neighborhood over eggs and muffins. It worked out fine but I have since learned that much of surviving an overactive toddler (now preschooler) is just choosing to Do Less Than That. His birthdays now involve only other children + their parents, a park shelter, and a pile of packaged snacks. I aspire to do Even Less in the future, if possible.

After that brunch, though, the neighborhood kinda treated my little tornado child like Their Little Tornado Child. I’d get texts that they had books for him for his birthday, or that he should come over and play with my neighbor’s grandkids, or texts that they’d seen us somewhere around town, probably checking out an old train car or some construction equipment. I was so strung out on getting the house set up and keeping my toddler out of traffic for pretty much the first 8 months of living in our new town, but my most grounded moments were with our neighbors, the people who were willing to show my kid how their leaf blower worked or let him examine all the rocks in their gravel pile.

We became a neighborhood that bakes Christmas-time sweets and makes enough to send a tin or tub home with each person when we see them. One family started doing game nights, one lady held a “cake-nic,” an astounding party where every family brought a cake and we all ate a ton of sugar (I’m shocked that my kid was one of the only ones there - it should have been very popular with the kid set). I became the sourdough lady of the neighborhood - as I emerged out of the toddler parenting forest, I found that with about $.50 of flour and a few minutes of effort here and there throughout my SAHM life, I could bake bread that credibly rivaled $9 loaves at the farmer’s market. Well, not the nice farmer’s market, but like, one that hasn’t gotten a really good sourdough baker in yet? Like an okay farmer’s market. Whatever y’all, you get what you get.

So I made the bread, and each time I had a new bread loaf, I’d figure out a neighbor I hadn’t given bread to before and me and my little guy would go to deliver it to them. They were generally pleased if mildly bewildered (they did not ask for bread before, though they did later). It was my way of saying, “hope you have a good week.” It was my way of saying, “thank you for talking to me when most of my day was just being screamed at.”

I’ve had other back-and-forths - two of my neighbors have requested flowers from our garden, a bit of magnolia one time and a spray of forsythia the second time. We bought our home from the estate of an amazing woman who was still fastidiously cultivating a gorgeous yard at age 97 when she passed, and it felt inappropriate to gatekeep the yard that was still so beautiful despite our widespread and honestly-expanding neglect of it. The flowers felt like the sourdough - something embarrassingly simple to share, that cost me nothing and built something between us. Something a little better and more beautiful than just kvetching about the state of the utilities or the incoming bears in the street.

Our neighbor is endlessly embarrassed that her dog hops their fence and enjoys our yard as a private pooping palace, and another neighbor is always letting me know when the gang of wild turkeys that roams our neighborhoods has decided that the reflection in my car is looking at them wrong and starts pecking the exterior. We make sure that mail gets to the right person even if it is wrongly delivered. I once was at the grocery store when a neighbor really needed butter for some baking, and I got some for her. She had too many corn plants for her garden and gave me one. My kid basically lives in the hand-me-downs from another neighbor.

I often want to do things that make a big impact on people’s lives - don’t we all? But giving embarrassingly large gifts is always a little weird, creates a beholdenness that so few of us want to have to feel ourselves. My husband once wisely said that to make a friend, ask them for a managably small favor. Favors bind us to each other, as long as they aren’t backbreaking or an attempt to take, and take and take.

The grooves between neighbors here have worn smooth because we traverse the distances between each other often enough that we trust that no one is trying to take from anyone else. And because we know that Mike has an in at the water department at this point and seems to be the key to getting the pipe repaired.