Neighbors

Our neighbors are moving in. So what, you're thinking, neighbors move in and out all the time, especially around Town. But these are special neighbors: these are our downstairs neighbors, the people with whom we will be sharing our house for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever.

We've always done well with neighbors. Once we shared a side-by-side duplex with my stepbrother, which was great. Another time we lived in a funky little complex with four units (an old house broken up into three flats with another one above the garage), and we all became quite good friends, that is, the kind of friends you stop and chat with and occasionally share drinks with, but don't keep in touch with after you move.

In Red State Capital City Suburb, our neighbors on one side were essentially M and E's foster grandparents: we visited back and forth weekly if not daily, celebrated break-fast, Hanukkah, and seder together, invited each other to parties, shared important news as soon as it happened. On the other side there was a rental, but the last two families who lived there also became good friends, and on the other side of them were the infamous S and E, children of L and B, our favorite family in all of Red State Capital City Suburb.

But in Red State Capital City Suburb we had a house. Sure, our dining room looked straight into the neighbors' kitchen, across just a dozen feet of driveway. Sure, everyone on the block knew our every move, just like we knew their every move. Sure, M and E and S and E treated our two houses and yards as one, moving seamlessly back and forth between them, begging whichever parent was nearest for snacks. But our house--our walls, our basement, our roof, our deck, our garden--was ours.

When we started looking for a place to live in Town, it immediately became clear that if we bought a house, E would be sleeping in a closet, all the books and records would need to be sold, and we'd be eating oatmeal for the next thirty years. So we bought a condo. When we told our friends in Red State that we were buying a condo, they all looked appalled. There, condos are those horrible complexes by the freeway where recent college graduates and recent divorced dads precariously perch. But our condo is half a house: the second and third floor of a 1913 two-family, along with half the basement, half the driveway, and a shared garden. As of yesterday, F and L own the first floor, half the basement, half the driveway, and a shared garden.

I think it's the garden that makes me most anxious. Not for any gardening reasons. God knows, if F and L want to garden, I'll be thrilled. More for kid reasons. They are a yuppie couple, probably a dozen years younger than us. So far they seem very nice, and they talk a great line about kids. And the fact is, all these houses are becoming condos, and basically all of them have a family with kids on the second and third floor and a yuppie couple on the first floor, so they must have known what they were getting into.

We could end up the best of friends. I grew up in a three-family building, and we always did fine with our neighbors. C lived in exactly the same set-up as we have now--her family on the second and third floor, and a succession of young couples on the first, until the final young couple became a family and eventually bought the house from her parents. They were always the best of friends.

I don't want to think about the alternatives. But being the worrier that I am, I can't help worrying. Will the kids be too loud and messy? Will our music make them crazy? Will their music make us crazy? Will they hear me yell at my children--or worse, at my husband--and think I'm a shrew? Will we have scary fights about snow shoveling and shrub pruning? (I can't tell you how much I do not care about snow shoveling and shrub pruning...)

Really, though, they seem very nice. And tonight they had a bunch of friends over, and I could only hear the music because the windows were open. They were hanging out on their deck, and M and E were playing in the garden, and it was the most pleasant of domestic scenes. I'll just try to fixate on that.