Lights Out

Our neighbors, Dan and Eva (our parental-comrades-in-arms), moved away a couple of months ago. Like us, they have two preschoolers. Unlike us, they have another baby on the way.  They nearly outgrew their tiny cottage when their first son arrived five years ago. I helped them with a design to finish-out their basement. With a little creativity from me and a lot of determination from them, they bought enough time to see their younger son through his second birthday. But when they became pregnant with their third child last spring, the jig was up. My husband and I awaited the inevitable news of their move, selfishly wishing they’d stay.

We miss our neighbors a lot. They still live in town, but our orbits no longer overlap. Even when they lived in our neighborhood, it was hard to get together.  Our kids’ ages are staggered by a year (ours are 3 & 6; theirs are 2 & 5), so their interests and abilities didn’t always match up. But most significantly, our work schedules and our children’s nap times didn’t align. I’d return from work and see Eva pulling out of her driveway. When our kids were waking up from naps, theirs would be going down. During the fall and winter months, pathogens were the culprit for missed visits. Illness seemed to strike our households on alternating weeks. Our preschoolers, with their burgeoning immune systems, got sick a lot. Whole seasons went by without even a quick afternoon playdate.

But we saw our neighbors every day, even if only at a distance. Morning, noon, and night, we’d catch glimpses of each other in our parallel parental universes. They’d be pushing the stroller, and we’d wave as we drove to the pediatrician’s. Upon rising in the morning, my husband and I would glance out the window at Eva and Dan’s house. Were their cars in the driveway? Had they brought in the newspaper? These fleeting observations told the story of how their morning was going, and how much they’d been up the night before, tending to their kids.  In the afternoons, as I carried my children downstairs from their naps, I’d look out the window to see Eva unbuckling her sons from their car seats. Her boys were sometimes drapey or writhing-mad, and I recognized her efficient maneuverings to shuttle them to bed.  At night before turning in, I’d glance out the window one last time to see if Eva and Dan’s lights were out. Had they beaten us to bed? Often they had. I’d hasten to brush my teeth, suddenly aware of the late hour, and of the sleep I was squandering.

In landscape architecture, there’s a design device called “borrowed landscape.” Especially in Japan, gardens designed in cramped quarters were made to feel more expansive by ‘borrowing’ views into adjacent properties or opening up vistas of distant mountains.  That’s exactly what my husband and I were doing: expanding our lives by borrowing community at a time of social isolation. Witnessing Eva and Dan’s tireless efforts on behalf of their children helped us appreciate the hard work we were doing. We felt validated just knowing they were there.

Our families borrowed literal things, too. Cups of milk, doses of children’s Tylenol, trash stickers–all delivered to the street corner between our houses, often under duress, and with just a quick hello and smile of understanding. Each of us was one part boxer, one part coach, saying “now get back in the ring!” More than once, Eva and Dan picked up urgent prescriptions for my children late at night when my husband was traveling. One time we handed off a bag of food to them as they loaded hurriedly into their car on the way to the emergency room. Neither of us had local family, so we supported each other at times both critical and quotidien.

Now my children are the only little ones in the neighborhood. Ranch houses line our block, occupied mostly by retirees. The elderly couple who lived next door to Eva and Dan–the Wicks–were recently relocated by their grown children to a nursing home. Our next door neighbor, Mr. Thomas, is an eighty-year-old widower and a friend of the Wicks’. On the day of their move, he stood on the sidewalk watching the workers load the truck.  These days, as I head to bed, I wonder if Mr. Thomas misses seeing signs of life at the Wicks’ house out his window, just as we miss the warm glow of lamplight at Eva and Dan’s out ours.  The two houses sit empty side by side in the dark, illuminated only by a swath of salmon-colored light from the streetlight. Out of habit, I still look.