Chris
and I have been taking evening walks in the neighborhood, every night so long
as it isn’t pouring, and as long as it is still light. Our neighborhood is a wonderful mix of
houses, some run down a bit, and some painstakenly cared for. I love both kinds equally, as almost all the
homes around here are very old, and thus even when run down they have great
character. One of the several things I
badly miss about our Snohomish home is the neighborhood. If you’ve followed the blog at all, you’ve
heard about it before.
At the end of the
main street of Historic Snohomish is a small cul-de-sac of old, brightly
painted historic homes. Behind them is a
garden, all netted together, full of plants I remember from my childhood. If you live in one of those homes, you are
part of the Neighborhood, which I learned was a small community of people that
instantly became family and friends, the kind you would have last minute dinner
parties with, drink wine outside under the stars and flower, and slap
miquitos. Indeed, we spent a few of the
wee hours of our labor with Ben wandering our neighbors’ back yards, because it
was such a lovely and peaceful place to experience excruciating pain, and
really the best part was knowing we were welcome.
When
it came to buy a home, we had to move, sadly.
We have lived in Everett now for about a year and a half, and although I
know nothing will ever be like The Neighborhood, I think this place has
potential. There seem to be plenty of storybook
characters living around here, some new to the area, and some who have been
here longer than I’ve been alive. We
pass by a few of them as we are taking our walks, and we are starting to build
our own neighborhood personality as we chat with them.
It was on our walk yesterday as we were exchanging
gardening ideas with a couple who had just torn out part of their yard that I
realized that unlike Snohomish where we moved into an instant neighborhood,
here we’d have to make our own. I have
heard enough comments from various folks to know that the desire to actually
know each others’ names and be welcome in each others’ yards is actually there,
just no one has really started working toward it yet.
Having grown up in the middle of nowhere, I
had no neighbors, so I’m not really sure how to go about it. Chris, of course, doesn’t have a shy bone in
his body. He can talk to anybody, and I
mean anybody. Me, I speak in food, among
other things. Maybe I’ll drop off some
cookie gifts and see where it leads us….