I would like to tell you that we met our next-door neighbors on our second day in Georgia. On the day we moved in, a sweltering July day in 2011. I will tell you that, actually, because I think it is true. I know that I was sweating profusely after moving all of our possessions into our house, the lease on which we'd signed approximately one hour after arriving in this town on a Friday afternoon. The next day was a Saturday, and the heat index was predicted to be 105 degrees, and the B and I were up early, fresh from the Baymont Inn, and stocked with Gatorade, ready to wrestle a couch.
As physical moves go, that one was surprisingly easy--having your own driveway leading up to a one-story house is so very, pleasantly, different than trying to move furniture from an 1880s home with no driveway and limited street parking--and we were finished by perhaps 11 am. I was wearing a Buffalo Bisons t-shirt from the 1980s. Our neighbors came outside at some point, and they noticed my shirt, and it turns out we were all from the same corner of New York State, and then they greeted us and went back inside. A few weeks later, I wrote to my friends in an email We hung out with our neighbors on Saturday night, which was fun, and it will hopefully become a routine.
In literature, this is known as foreshadowing.
Or maybe I should start earlier, in the 1990s, in the suburbs of Buffalo where I grew up. For a couple short years, there were about four houses on our block with young families, families like ours. As an adult, I've actually wondered how well all these adults got along, since in retrospect these families were pretty different. But what matters more is that in photos from that time, the adults are standing in each other's driveways, drinking cans of Labatt Blue. The kids are sitting on blanket, watching for shooting stars, or dressed up in Halloween costumes, or swimming in an above-ground pool.
In a few years, of course, things would change; families would fracture, or move away, or the friendships borne of geographic convenience would shift as kids entered high school. Still, for those years, I entered my neighbors' unlocked doors as if their houses were my own. I stood on their back porches and asked them questions through their screen doors, and they would motion for me to come in already.
Later, when we lived in our little white house in Minnesota, five of us and the dog squeezed into that shoddy place, we never locked the door. One of the roommates didn't even have keys to the place, and anyway, like all grad students, we had nothing worth taking. Some nights, when I walked home from night class or came home early from the restaurant, I would have to push open the side door. Coats and boots would be piled in front of the door, most of them not ours. Our friends would be over for dinner, or to watch television, or to sit on our couch. In those moments, I knew that we had built something in that town. We had friends. We had a community.
Here's the thing: when we left Minnesota in 2007, I had had that experience twice in my life. I didn't ever expect it to happen again. I thought perhaps it was something faintly magic, that it was something like lightning.
Once in Buffalo, well, that was what happened in the suburbs when all the houses are only ten feet apart. And in Minnesota, well, that was happened in graduate school, when time and pressure and booze--great rivers of booze--and slightly damaged, pleasantly misanthropic people found themselves locked in classrooms during cold winters, workshopping poetry and prose.
My theory held up for a while, too, because our circles of friends in Wisconsin and Michigan were good, very good, but not quite the same. I figured we were Becoming Adults, and part of that meant that the raucous dinner parties and the whole community thing was a natural casualty.
Then we met our neighbors here in Georgia, and they blew the fucking roof right off of that theory of mine.
Our neighbors are funny and incredibly kind and charming. They worked for the same university we do, and through them we met a whole network of university-affiliated ex-pats. They helped us navigate this town, its Southern-ness and its quirks, and we developed our own shorthand: a Statesboro moment, for example, like when you go to the pharmacy and though there are five other people conceivably waiting for a prescription, no one is in an actual, recognizable, line. Or when the local grocery store runs out of all milk--all of the milk, from full-fat to skim, all sizes, like the entire library of milk is currently closed for business--and the clerk just shrugs and tells you there might be more, you know, tomorrow. If y'all want to come back then.
Our neighbors and I would talk about what it was like to go to college in small cities in New York State, stories that inevitably included chicken finger subs. They brought us things when they went back up north, like cases of Western New York beer, or this shirt referencing McKinley's assassination, which I wear when I work out, not because I want to ruin it with pit stains but because I want to wear it as often as possible. They gave us copies of their house key, and we gave them ours. We swapped dogs and brought in each other's mail during holidays and gossiped over text messages about what the other neighbors, the weirdo ones, might be up to.
Our neighbors and I would sometimes go out to get the mail about the same time, both home from work around 5:30, and we would stand in the driveway with our arms lightly crossed, our dogs sniffing the grass near our feet, and we would talk, swatting gnats, until it was time to go in and start dinner or the sun set behind the old elementary school across the street.
Our neighbors came to our raucous dinner parties, our taco nights that ended in dance parties. And they held their own, nights that earned the ex post facto nickname of casino nights, because hey, it would be seven o'clock, then ten-thirty, and then suddenly it was four in the morning and we were drinking whisky out of a glass bottle shaped like a soccer cleat.
Our neighbors invited us out to dinner and to soccer games and took us to the way-sketch pool hall downtown. They knew the restaurant owners and seemingly everyone who was also out on those nights, and, though I'm making them sound like much bigger party animals than they are, that's because our most famous Boro nights happened in the company of our neighbors, and because they like to talk to people and make connections. They are those kind of people.
And other times, we didn't see our neighbors for days or weeks, because we were all busy, but I knew they were next door, coming and going as we were, and knowing they were home fifty feet away just made me feel better.
When the B and I decided to elope last summer, we did so because of our neighbors. Through them, and in them, we had made and met friends here that felt like a real community. We had built something, something tangible and firm, something that felt like home. It felt right to go to the courthouse, then back to our house, and turn on the music and make tacos and push the furniture out of the dining room and turn it into a dance hall. Our neighbors brought their dogs and we all danced until 2:30 am, even as we ran out of liquor and the stove randomly short-circuited and we had to kill the breaker.
Part of working for a university, especially when you are contractual faculty and your friends are staff, means you make friends that won't always be around. Your friends are often on their way up, promoted and moving out, looking for a place that's a little closer to home. I should have known. I've done it myself a few times now. So in fall 2012, when I came across a song by the band The Head and The Heart, which starts, A year from now we'll all be gone/All our friends will move away /And they're going to better places/But our friends will be gone away, I played that song for anyone who would listen, including our neighbors. I played it twenty times in a row. I knew that it would apply to nearly all of us. I knew it might apply to me and the B, again, one day.
Last week, on the night our neighbors told us they were leaving for Binghamton, I sat on the kitchen floor and played that song three times.
This, as it turns out, is my love letter to our neighbors. Though of course you already knew that. Foreshadowing.
I am sad, so terribly sad, that my neighbors are leaving. At the same time, I am so happy that they are, in fact, going to a better place, a better university in a town nestled in the hills, nearer to their families. I keep trying to steel myself for the day that is rapidly approaching, when their cars are no longer in the driveway I will think of, always, as theirs.
I will sorely miss them, and what they helped us make here, in this town. They are, in some ways, our first four years in this town. But I am forever grateful that they were an integral, heart-beating part of our life here. I am grateful that they helped us build a life here that resembled something I now fiercely defend.
I wish them the very best on their journey over the rivers and roads that will lead them back north, toward something brighter, maybe something even better than we--together--got to build here.
