like a good neighbor
I was gone for two solid weeks in August, during which time I don’t think it rained *once* in Roanoke, Virginia. I despaired over my tiny little community garden plot. I’d been forced to do a full-on garden re-start in mid-summer, thanks to drought and groundhogs, but my Uncle Bruce had come over and built me an ironclad vermin fence, so I planted carrots and half-runners and squash and okra inside the fortress and crossed my fingers.
Then I left and it stopped raining, entirely. A friend had agreed to keep watch over my little plot, but I knew she was busy and wouldn’t be watering every day. I dreaded what I’d see when I got home in September. Okra carcasses, I was sure. Dried squash remains. Brown, brittle husks where beans should have been. I saw it all in my mind, certain of the garden’s demise.
But when I crested the hill and walked to my plot, there stood an apparition, an angel, a woman wielding the hose and directing it at my very plot, where not only was nothing dead or brittle, EVERYTHING was STRAIGHT UP THRIVING:
Even the morning glories were happy to see me. I chatted with the woman, who I’d met before. She’s a neighbor without a house, I think, and takes advantage of the freely available water in the community garden to bathe and brush her teeth before going to work. I thanked her profusely for watering my garden, and she confessed that some of the other gardeners there have gotten angry with her for her efforts. I don’t know who the angry people are, but I know this woman literally saved my garden’s life.
//
My friend Lauree is nearing the end of her life, and I’ve gotten to visit her a couple of times as she winds things down. Several years ago, Lauree moved from her own house into a co-housing community, where everyone has their own apartment but they own the building together and are intentional about how their lives look and how the community operates. Each time I’ve visited, neighbors have already been there, sitting in the common area with Lauree, running down the stairs to let her visitors in the front door, checking on her in the evening. I was telling someone about Lauree’s decline and they asked if she was home alone during this season. “Well,” I said, “she is at home, but she is DEFINITELY not alone.”
//
Last night at 10pm, the fire alarm went off in my apartment building. All of us trundled outside, babies and pets in tow. EIGHT fire trucks screamed their way down the hill to us. Slowly, the word got around that a neighbor on the top floor had a kitchen fire and the sprinklers that got triggered left water damage in every apartment underneath. We stood outside for a couple of hours until most of us got to return to our homes; ten apartments’ worth of neighbors got displaced by the damage.
My building is big, and lots of people live here. I haven’t always been great at knowing my neighbors; it can be kind of awkward, as an apartment dweller, to exchange pleasantries with the people whose private conversations float through your air vents or whose nocturnal habits invade your sleep. But here, one socially insistent woman on my hall has invited and cajoled me into making friends in ways that meant when I found myself on the curb at midnight, dog cradled in my arms, I also found myself surrounded by people whose names I know, whose numbers are saved in my phone, and who I would not hesitate to ask for help if I needed it. (I am fine; so is my apartment.)
//
I have been despairing a bit, these days, over political negligence and capitalism gone amuck, over the challenges of trying to live with integrity in a society that simply accepts the violence of school shootings and genocide without blinking, where women’s autonomy is being legislated out of existence and very basic kindness seems to have no place in the public discourse of the day. I’m struggling to trust in institutions of any sort, these days, which is probably a long-overdue, rational response to the absurd dystopian realities we are forced to navigate.
But it turns out: I have not at all lost faith in people. Specific, real, complicated and conflicted, flesh and blood, life-saving and infuriating people are literally saving my life, left and right. I want to learn to be a better neighbor, myself. To water strangers’ gardens. To spend time simply sitting nearby and being present together. To be someone that people both care for and expect care from. I suspect that those of us who live in privilege have expected the institutions to do all that for us for a long, long while. But those of us who’ve lived on the margins have always had to find workarounds, alternatives, relationships that keep us safe when the institutions refuse to do it.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s Jesus. “And who is my neighbor?” That’s a privileged know-it-all, trying to weasel out of the command. Like me. Like you?