Good neighbors make good neighbors
In memory of Lady
In my first full week back living in my parents’ home, when things were still feeling eerily like I was just on vacation, I went for a run in my neighborhood. My parents’ neighborhood, I guess, though it’s mine again, now. Running down the busier suburban roads, I felt like every car that passed must have been driven by someone who’d recognize me. I felt exposed, like a raw nerve, aware of my body as it jogged in a way I hate to be, looking at myself as if from the outside in, waiting for someone to honk or roll down their window and for me to smile politely and say hi.
I slowed my pace from a crawl to a walk as my house got back in sight, on my quiet road. I usually cut through Lady’s yard anyway—a yard I learned to ride my bike in, when I was little. Round and round and round the circle driveway on my red trike until we took the training wheels off, trailing behind my sister. There was a man sitting on Lady’s front stoop. Frank, her son, who I think is the oldest? They all look alike, with dark hair and eyes, and wide smiles, and there are a lot of them. I figure there are a lot of us Grantlands, too, so I reintroduce myself. He already knew my name. Frank told me Lady was being discharged into hospice care later that day.
I knew Lady had been in the hospital, and that she was 94. I knew that I hadn’t seen her in her backyard garden in weeks. But Lady has never not lived next door, not in literally my entire memory, so the possibility of that ever changing seemed foreign to me. I figured I would see her out there soon, smaller and grayer than I remember her being, but still here, always here. Doc, her husband, had died when I was in high school, and I think the funeral was during the school day. But it was even weirder, that Doc and Lady, so fixed in my mind and in that house next door, would soon both be gone.
I left my job in Arlington because my friend, Charles, went and spent 20 long and beautiful and exhausting months in hospice care, which really made me disinterested in grieving anyone else. But also, a bit of an expert in stress-shopping and stress-cooking.
My to-do list for the day, up until that point, consisted of one activity—run—so with the fervor of a chronic overworker given a task to do, I went to the promised land: Target. When my friend Anna’s partner, Brandon, entered hospiceland, I fought that horrible I-can’t-fix-it feeling by making a long list of things that made the experience less hard for Charles and his chosen family. For Lady, I spent my mom and dad’s money on as much as I could find of that list.
Soft tissues. Underpads—a lot of them. A trash can with a lid, and trash bags that actually fit in it. Room smell-good spray. Tiny pre-toothpasted disposable toothbrushes. Working Hands hand lotion to put by the sink. Bathing wipes. Hand wipes. Bum wipes. Disinfecting wipes.
I’m really eco friendly until someone I love is dying.
Incidentally, I also bought M&Ms, because if there was any time to bust out my dad’s Christmas cookies, it was January, when Lady’s family would all be in and out of her house. The recipe is a slightly-tweaked version of the one on the back of the Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chip bag, repeated so many times every Christmas that my parents’ kitchen has two ovens for this and only this purpose. My dad sends them out in Tupperwares to the majority of his office, to our teachers and friends, to family friends we only talk to about once a year, when delivering cookies. To his various kids in their various colleges. A lot to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. And to every single family on our street, with a masking-tape label saying, “Free Refills.” One of my favorite things about being home for the holidays is some child or another that I don’t recognize—the kids I babysat on our street having, inexplicably, grown up, just as I did—showing up at our door with an empty Tupperware. Leaving with it refilled.
Not to brag, but I can whip up cookies just as good, especially in a pinch. So I did. Forgoing the Tupperware in favor of just two gallon Ziploc bags, left with the bag from Target like an offering at Lady’s doorstep, where I’d definitely dropped off cookies before. The stoop where my brother, sister, and I stood with our buckets held out on Halloween, far older than we probably should have been, still trick-or-treating. Because Lady always had full bars.
My family grills out about once every two weeks, sometimes with my grandparents. For years, the grill lived in the carport, and my dad would turn on his car speakers and listen to his tunes while he grilled steaks by the trash bins. (These days, with no kids in college, he has a nice grill under a covered porch in the backyard.) As long as we’ve been grilling, we’ve walked a plate over to Lady.
Lady gets our mail when we’re out of town. She usually leaves her doors unlocked—every one of them—but when she hand-delivered the mail, she’d do so with a big rubber band around it. “Not really anything interesting this time around,” she’d say.
There’s an intimacy to living so close together, and for so long. Lady would also come to feed my beloved childhood dog, Ginger, and take her out when needed. She knew our alarm code, had it written on the back of a business card from my dad, from probably 2001 when we moved in. She and Doc bought their home after it was built, over 70 years ago.
One time, she found Ginger (who periodically got a bee in her bonnet and made a cheeky escape) trotting down Beltine Boulevard as if she wasn’t a tiny dachshund at least a mile from home. Lady parked on the side of the busy road, Ginger coming right to her, and took her home to us.
She had a key to ours, and ours to hers, and also, each of us had half the blocks’ keys, too. They come in handy more often than you’d think; I locked myself out of the house more than once as a kid. After the first time I went to Lady’s for help, she told me just to go around to her side door—always open—and get the key off the hook myself. There were dozens. She just asked that I put it back when I was done.
There was a different time, when I was younger, and home alone. My mom, probably holding my baby brother, set the house alarm for “away” instead of “stay.” When I shut a door, the house filled with noise and lights. I’d never seen it do that before. I ran to Lady’s as fast as I could.
I don’t remember what she did, or said. She probably called my mom or dad, or both. Probably had me sit in her comfy front room. Probably smiled and reminded me everything was fine. There was probably a friendly dog there. I don’t remember. But I do remember feeling safe.
I was pretty sure Lady would live forever, hospice be damned, given that Charles took a four-day prognosis and told it he wasn’t ready yet. But Lady, I think, was ready. Her grandson texted us when she’d passed, a few weeks later.
The daffodils in our yard bloomed that morning, for the first time this year.
The funeral was set for Saturday, but Lee, Lady’s daughter who lived with her after Doc died, asked if one of us Grantland kids could stay at Lady’s house during the service. Turns out, at least in Southern urban legend, people trawl the obituary pages for the dates and times of funerals and choose those moments to come rob dead people’s houses. I’m not sure how threatening I am to potential intruders, but I didn’t mind. I typically have an “always go to the funeral” policy, but after a shitty 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution to go to more weddings than funerals in 2024–one that, one would think, wouldn’t be hard given that I’m only 26. But I’d actually already gone to a funeral this year, for someone too young who I really, really wish was not dead, and I have received nary a save-the-date for 2024. I’m going to need my coupled friends to get on that, stat. (I probably should stop saying, ”What am I, a child bride?” when people ask if the boy and I are getting married.)
Anyway, I walked myself across the yard to Lady’s on Saturday morning, the driveway full of cars from the funeral home, the house full of people dressed in black, smiling and laughing and looking so alike. So like Doc and Lady. They thanked me for the various wipes; they liked that the note I included was signed, “Liddy, middle kid, dark hair.” I was alone left with somebody’s dog in a house that I hadn’t seen the inside of for a long time.
It looked about the same as when I was eight or so, having run over in a panic. There were photos of the kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, everywhere. Mostly frozen in time in their 90’s outfits, their braces and their YMCA soccer jerseys, but some photos from their weddings, all grown up. The kitchen was full of notes written in Lady’s distinctive cursive: people’s addresses and phone numbers, reminders, recipes, funny quotes. Then den smelled like dogs and familiarity. I settled onto the couch in the cozy front room, the room where Lady had died, and I felt a little sad, but very safe. Even though everything was different.
When the service was nearly over, some well-dressed ladies came over with Little Pigs Barbecue for the family luncheon. I answered the door in my socks, my hair sticking up, probably. Leggings and a sweatshirt. I used my sleuthing and hosting skills to help them locate ice, cokes, trash cans, paper plates, big bowls for rolls. They asked my name.
“Liddy.”
“No, your last name.”
“Oh, Grantland.”
“Huh.” They didn’t know me, us, despite the way they seemed like they probably knew everybody important in the state of South Carolina.
Lee gave the eulogy. My mom cried when she told me how Lee had named us neighborhood kids, listed out how many of us Lady watched grow up.
“The Grantland kids, who have gone on to do great things.”
I’ve lived many places much more crowded and louder than my home since moving out. Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, my parents fretting because I was on the first floor in New York City. Also, a collection of run-down dorms and apartments, where the thuds of my neighbors next door went on all day and night. (One time, showing up to my friend’s door with Chipotle after his grandma died, the neighbors next door must have been having sex literally in their doorway. “John, sorry about your grandma, your neighbors are fucking.”) My mom remembers her grad school apartment being literally above a train track and never once noticing a train.
And, for the record, I didn’t often notice Lady. Her driveway would fill with cars every week like clockwork as her family gathered for Thursday night dinner. On Thanksgiving, the family would put up cardboard painted Peanuts cartoons which used to be taller than me. It was the scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas, wonky tree and all. We’d wave across our front yards if we got home from dinner as the grandkids (then, great-grandkids) played in the front yard. We’d talk over the fence if we were both outside playing with the dogs in our backyards. But her granddaughter’s old, dumb dog, Jack, who came to doggie daycare in Lady’s backyard on the regular and barked at nothing, all day long? Slept right through it, every day.
But I will notice her absence.
That’s the thing. You get used to your neighbors, but that’s, ideally, the point. You know them well enough to know when something’s wrong.
Like when Helen, our neighbor on the other side, fell off a ladder, putting up Christmas lights. Laid in the cold with a broken leg until my sister came home from cheer practice and heard her yelling. Until my mom and dad went out and found her, carried her to the car and drove her to the hospital.
Or when an ambulance came for Mrs. Wood, catty-cornered to us, who I went over and did housework for for two afternoons a week for years. She had MS, and used a powered wheelchair. From her, I learned how to cut an onion. How to clean up shattered glass. How to organize a closet, dust a ceiling fan, prune a flower garden, shop for produce, sight-read choir music. She died in the hospital a few weeks after the ambulance arrived. Her daughters sold the house, and a family with kids lives there now. Which I think she would have liked. (They get unlimited Christmas cookies.)
Or when our city flooded, and we went from house to house, checking in on people. Two streets over, houses flooded, and for the next few weeks, we went around pulling waterlogged shit out of our neighbors’ basements and into big dumpsters. My parents and a neighborhood nurse organized a tetanus shot clinic—did you know you need one every ten years? Nobody remembers that, but tetanus loves a flooded basement, and our neighbors had a lot of those.
Lady—and all my neighbors—were not abstract to me. They were concrete. They were fixtures in my life, architecture just like the homes we live in. And we belonged to each other, not because we chose to the way one might choose a friend. But because we occupied the same physical space. And given the choice between strangers living a few feet from you, or friends? Lady taught me to pick friends.
At L’Arche, I moved into a place where neighbors mattered. Where the architecture of our neighborhoods meant the difference between isolation and community. One of the many injustices of institutionalization meant that people didn’t have the opportunity to form relationships with anyone other than staff, much less their neighbors. Folks with disabilities were taken out of their own neighborhoods, the proximities and connections they had formed there, and housed in institutions where the possibilities of forming organic and meaningful relationships were severely limited. Part of how we form community is in our proximity—you don’t get that, stuck on the third floor of a hospital building somewhere, or even in a home, but without the tools you need to safely and effectively navigate the world.
L’Arche is pretty conspicuous. Our two homes in Virginia are situated a couple blocks away from one another in a neighborhood quite similar to the one I grew up in, where many folks have lived in single-family homes for decades. Where property values have skyrocketed lately, thanks to gentrification, but where the majority of homes (including the two L’Arche houses) were purchased at middle-class rates in the 90’s and early 2000’s. We had a lot of neighbors, mostly white, with young kids or grandkids. Some empty nesters, some single people, and mostly folks without visible disabilities.
The L’Arche houses may look typical, except for the ramp or the wheelchair lift, but especially during covid, we took walks all the time. People who hadn’t known us before grew to recognize us: people in wheelchairs, people with Down's Syndrome, people who occasionally took walks while feeling very stressed and thus yelling a bit. John, our neighbor and former L’Arche executive director, took walks with his dog, Jack, and E, a L’Arche core member, nearly every night for a year, E full of the kind of energy that’s hard to burn off while stuck indoors. E met nearly every dog in the neighborhood during those days, knowing them by name. Yelling from far away, “IS THAT A NICE DOG?” Leaning down to kiss the dogs, usually on the mouth. He’s neighborly like that.
The power went out while I was working at L’Arche one night. Standing in the middle of the house, darkness and quiet fell, nearly totally. I heard Arturo’s generator start up next door. I knocked on his door on my way home to my apartment to ask if his power was out, too. He said it was, and offered to run an extension cord from his generator to our fridge. He’s done it before.
When it snowed and I was out shoveling anyway, I shoveled Christine’s walk. She’s next door, on the other side. Cleared off her car, too. Why? Well, I was already outside and bundled. Christine uses a cane. And E clears her clean out of her chocolate bars every Halloween.
The across-the-street neighbors, Nick and Lauren, have three kids, one of whom was born literally the day before quarantine went into effect. We spent a lot of time on the front porch, watching him turn from an infant to a toddler. He’d run around his yard, use words, go to school, and I’d be shocked, because that meant it had been literal years since March 2020.
Martha, catty-cornered to us, loves hosting and grilling out in her backyard. She hosts local musicians on her back porch. Everytime Hazel saw her, usually as we sat minding the neighborhood from our porch, she reminded Martha to invite her over for a hot dog and a beer.
And when Hazel had a birthday—Christine, Arturo, Martha, Nick and Lauren and their kids—all showed up.
It meant something, that when I trained people on what to do in emergencies, I could say with confidence, “If you are all alone, and you need help, send E or K next door and get our neighbors.”
It meant something, when I hit a car, embarrassingly, and knew whose car I hit. And that they knew where to find me.
It meant something, that when I started going way too fast on my roller skates and bailed into some trash cans a few houses down from L’Arche, my neighbor—whose name I never learned—ran out of the house. Asked if I was okay. I apologized for knocking their trash cans over. “That doesn’t matter, as long as you’re alright.”
It meant something, that the neighbors who waved to Charles every day on the porch noticed when he wasn’t there anymore. Brought us flowers.
We get to be this for each other. We get to care enough to pay attention.
They say good fences make good neighbors, and they are talking, I think, about boundaries. Which are important! But I think it misses the point.
They say good fences make good neighbors, but also, white people like me invest a lot of time and energy into keeping people of color out of their neighborhoods. Build literal laws, drawing red lines—boundaries—around the spaces they’ve deemed suitable for people not-like them to inhabit. Because if someone isn’t just an idea, but a literal, real person, with kids and a dog and a yard and a car, with emergencies and routines and sounds and voices, it’s actually really hard to think of them as anything more than just like you. And I think we all know that, instinctively.
They say good fences make good neighbors, but it’s probably more like, good neighbors make good neighbors. And we actually get to decide to be good neighbors. It could be as simple as cookies or as complicated as life and death. Which are very nearly the same thing—showing up for each other. Being ready to be part of each others’ lives. Trusting that that closeness will bring safety because it will mean that we belong with one another.
They say good fences make good neighbors, and I know I am not safe or free or well unless I am cared for, and unless I am caring for other people. I know, neither are you. And if given the choice, I pick the harder, easier thing. The thing where we care about each other.
Lady taught me how.
Take care, my friends.
With love,
Liddy
You did it!! Good changes!👍🏼🥳
So lovely and moving and well written. Thank you for sharing 💜