My new house was already worrying me, and I hadn’t even moved in. The problem wasn’t all the work it needed, though the wood floors hadn’t been properly cleaned in decades and the kitchen appliances were relics of the 1970s.
Renovations would be costly, sure. But the trickier issue, by my estimate, would be relations with the neighbors. I had reason to fear there were some overly friendly people in the mix, which made me nervous some would be overly talkative, too.
“With this place, you wouldn’t just get a home, you’d get a neighborhood,” the seller’s agent told me at the open house.
She said this as if it were a selling point.
Apparently, the entire street held a pizza party every month, a 40-year tradition started by a few 70-somethings who’d lived on the block since they were raising kids. The rules were simple: Serve nothing fancier than pies from the place by the highway, and chocolate chip cookies or brownies for dessert. The goal was to keep things inexpensive, so everyone would participate.
My boyfriend practically turned cartwheels when he heard this. He’s a sociologist, which means he likes community so much that he studies it for a living. We’d barely learned my bid on the house had been accepted when he said, “We get the pizza parties, too!”
I groaned: “We’re not going.”
“Oh, come on. We have to,” he said. “This kind of thing doesn’t exist anymore.”
I know all about how our social contract has become so frayed that people don’t invest in their neighbors nowadays; I’ve read “Bowling Alone” and all that.
Yes, Americans are increasingly isolated which is bad for our health, both mental and physical. But, at my core, I’m an introverted extrovert. I’m happy to spend all day being friendly, but by the time I get home, I am spent, physically and socially.
Not everybody gets that. I’ve lived in 18 rental apartments over the course of my life and have encountered neighbors who wanted more from me than I could give. I regularly got trapped in long conversations at the end of the day: by a woman who would just keep talking whenever I said, “I need to go,” and another neighbor who got so prickly when I turned down her dinner invitation that she scared me.
Connection is important, but nothing makes me feel as alienated — and desperate to be left alone — as a conversation I can’t escape.
That said, I’d looked at more than 30 houses, and this one — with enough land and trees that I had built-in privacy — was perfect.
Even the pizza parties couldn’t scare me away.
***
More than two months passed before I finally moved in, and my front lawn became an eyesore in between. It was so overgrown that I probably wouldn’t have to worry about the pizza parties. Who would want to invite me?
Then one day shortly after I did move in, as I stood outside frowning at the horrible grass, a maroon SUV pulled up by my driveway. A woman with brown curls who looked roughly my age emerged and waved. “We live next door!” she called out.
I walked over. We introduced ourselves.
“I heard you’re a vet,” I said.
“I heard this is your first house,” she said, smiling. “Which probably means you don’t own a lawn mower yet. Do you?”
I took her question as proof: The neighbors already hated me. They had talked about how I was neglecting the lawn.
I tried to apologize, but the vet stopped me.
“We have a sit-down John Deere,” she said. “And it would take my husband five minutes to cut your lawn with it. If you want him to do it, just let me know.”
She gave me her number so we could arrange it. And then, rather than hanging around to talk, she said she was hungry and off she went.
By the end of that week, my jungle had been tamed. The vet’s husband, busy helping another neighbor, got Justin from up the street to do it. I gave Justin a box of thank-you pastries, but he played down his good deed with a grin, saying, “We’re excited to have another good person on the block.”
I didn’t mention I was actually a horrible person who hadn’t wanted a neighborhood.
All the same, with their kind gestures — and respectful boundaries! — these people were growing on me, especially after the couple across the street from Justin gave me a self-propelled push mower that they never used. And the vet’s 7-year-old daughter left plastic toy horses on my front tree stump to welcome me. And Justin’s 13-year-old watered my zinnias while I was away during a heat wave.
So when the vet sent out an email later that summer, announcing that she’d be hosting the next pizza party, my boyfriend didn’t need to coax me into attending. I jumped up and shouted, “We’re so totally going!”
“Let’s not stay too long,” I added.
But we lingered. At the very end, we traipsed down the vet’s long driveway with Justin and his family. The sun was setting over the blue buttons and pink poppies that the vet’s husband had planted. It felt like a kind of paradise.
Since then, my boyfriend and I have gone beyond pizza party attendance to join in many other extracurricular activities: There was a Halloween gathering at Justin’s house, for which I dressed in costume for the first time in 20 years, and a snow day outing during which we sledded down the hill almost as many times as the kids.
My good-hearted neighbors taught me a lesson they didn’t know I needed to learn. And these days, if anyone is a pest, it’s me.
I’m the one running over to greet the vet at her mailbox, with treats for her daughter (a tiny wooden bird; a tiny ceramic rabbit; a tiny tube of toothpaste, half the size of my pinkie). I’m the one leaping from my desk when I spot the Bernese mountain dog from around the corner strutting up the block. I always apologize to the owners for slowing them down. But they have told me they are invested in my relationship with their pet; they introduce me to other people as “Odie’s best friend.”
“You need a dog,” my boyfriend says.
Probably so. But for now, I’m happy with what I have: It isn’t just a home. It’s a neighborhood.
The post I Bought a House. I Got a Neighborhood. appeared first on New York Times.
