Evernew
Friday May 17th 2013, 9:53 pm
Filed under: Friends,Life

Our neighborhood was built for young families.

Their children grew up, many moved away and we moved in, our youngest coming along a year later.

Our children grew up and now we have new young neighbors. And the ones who had been surrogate grandparents to our little ones back in the day threw a party tonight to welcome the new couples in and to reconnect the older ones, a gesture much appreciated all around.

I would love someone to tell me stories on our house, and we got to tell a few on the others’.

I asked our hostess about their magnificent old plum tree outside the window, whose crop they have shared so generously with us so many times, and this good woman whose children are just younger than we are said it was there when they got here. Whether it was supposed to have been a standard or a semi-dwarf, she didn’t know and I knew it didn’t matter; it simply was a gracefully grown, beautiful, leafy tree, and no matter how many plums the squirrels took, she said, there always seemed to be plenty.

My baby fruit trees aspire to the day. I  smiled, wondering who might be enjoying them 50 years from now: peaches, plums, will the old lemons still be there, cherries, apples, blueberries, too, now, and I still hope to put in a Comice pear. I aspire to pass along a bounteous place that will give our future owners much. (While I’m still at the stage of hoping for anything for us on everything other than the lemons.)

One of the newcomers asked the name of the type of tree we have out front: Bradford pear–but no pears? No, they are tiny wooden things barely the size of your smallest fingernail, but the flowers are beautiful, and as we stepped outside at the end, I looked next door at it and marveled at the memory vs the present. “It was a twig when we moved here. With two supports. And look at it now.”

And in between it went through this but this past March looked like this.

I can’t wait to see what they plant at this house and that house and to get to play surrogate grandparents to their future children, to see how everything grows up to be all over again.

(Side note: this site will be down for awhile today while the resident admin does some work on it. Back soon.)


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When we moved in 29 years ago our neighborhood was filled with children. We couldn’t walk four steps without being stopped for a conversation or a peek into the baby carriage to see how so-and-so was growing. Annual block parties, bowling nights, holiday gatherings filled our calendar. We shared each others garden produce and freshly baked breads. But lately I have noticed a change. No one walks the babies after dinner, even though there are still plenty of young ones with the turnover of families over the years. There hasn’t been a party in 10 years or so. The closest thing to a neighborhood gathering has been the annual streetwide garage sale. I wonder if technology has interfered with the old traditions. Or is everyone just too busy? I miss the old neighborhood. Wow! I sound old!!!

Comment by Jody 05.18.13 @ 4:11 am



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