Neighborhoods

Four years ago I said goodbye to a neighborhood on the other side of the world. Not my neighborhood, but where my daughter, the Driver, lived with the Tech. A neighborhood I had come to feel at home in. I remember walking those streets in south China my last afternoon, soaking up the atmosphere, imbedding it deeply in my mind so that even now, four years later, I close my eyes and am there, almost able to touch the color of the late day sun and smell the sesame and peanut bars.

Now, once again, I have said goodbye to a little corner of the world that I would never have known had not my daughter moved here. In four years of visits I have come to feel at home in the cluster of townhouses outside my nation’s campus. I find myself pausing at a window, drinking in the deep woods to the back, looking down on the greensward hill where young boys toss a football and my grands search for Easter eggs, watching for the UPS truck or the red fixit guy’s truck. Though I don’t know their names, the neighbors are familiar. The guy next door who was deployed in Afghanistan last year heads across the street with his sons following, the little Chinese girl on the other side seems to have grown a foot -- even the dogs are friends.

A neighborhood is a collection of small pieces: the library around the corner where I sat the other morning searching the children’s books on the topic of “moving,” the jeweler who repaired things for me, the Anglican pre-school, the sweet middle-aged couples in the block of townhouses who have deeply impacted the lives of Boy Blue and Mei Mei – celebrating their birthdays, finding books and magazines on bugs, bringing balloons and stashing gummy treats in their garages.

We’re walking back from a frozen yogurt run one night when a neighbor two blocks away calls, “I have parsley for your swallowtail caterpillars.” Three neighbors are having a dog conference on a sunny lawn, but seeing Boy Blue, conversation turns to bug collections. He is a familiar visitor to their gardens; they relish watching a little blonde boy with a butterfly net or a Tupperware collection tub. When they hear he’s moving across the world, they express both dismay at their loss but also excitement at his future. Boy and dogs snuggle before we head home.

If it takes a village to raise a child, this little neighborhood has labored together to help raise these two little grands. Four years ago it was Mr. Wong guarding the door to keep a tiny baby from being taken out too soon into the night air, collecting moths in the mailbox for Bye-Ren’s cats, wiping tears from his eyes as I bit him goodbye my last night. Today it is the bug collectors, the dog friends down the street, and a host of others.

I wipe my own tears.

Soon they head once again across the world. The Driver and the Tech will once again do the hard work to build a new life and make friends; Boy Blue and Mei Mei will melt hearts; God will once again create a neighborhood.