On Having a Neighbor

Interrupted twilights, next-door chocolates and becoming as a little child

The other evening I went to the barn to check to see if the milk cow had come up from the pond. The atmosphere held the magic of twilight. My parent’s house was dark. They were asleep already, it being fishing season. My husband was inside with our children, getting them ready for bed. It was wonderful to be alone outside in the quiet of the crickets and pond-frogs, the occasional lowing of a cow, the humorous squawk of a chicken fighting for a better place on the roost. In the years before I got married I learned to love being alone. I could find company in the stillness of my mind, and I was just at the threshold of that again, when I turned the corner, bumped into an elderly man on the garden path and almost screamed. 

I had completely forgotten about him: our neighbor. My first true neighbor. He lives in the one-room cottage that used to be our house. We share a well and a water heater, a driveway, a yard, a back porch and a clothesline. Helen will find a reason nearly every day to knock on his door. It is a reasonable fascination I never knew as a child: to knock and listen and wait, unsure. She doesn’t want me to come, so I watch through the shrubs, leaning around the corner of the porch to listen. Sometimes he will open.

“Here are your eggs, Mr. Dirk,” she says. I am so proud of her, but often he doesn’t hear. Her voice is little and his ears are old.

“Good morning Miss Helen!” he will say, “Thank you for the eggs. Would you like a chocolate?”

They converse for a few minutes, warm but unclear, both in their broken English— for he is Dutch, and she is not yet three— but still they understand enough: Here is a chocolate man behind a door just next-door! Here is a lovely child, my smiling little friend. 

As for me, this has been a big adjustment. I remember, when I was single, how people would talk about marriage as sanctifying, and what they meant was that it is very hard—like being in the rock-tumbler—having all your rough edges bumped into all the time. Marriage for me has not been like this. I feel so loved and even treasured in marriage— how could that be hard? My husband does not expose my faults even when he should, and living with him is easy. Being a mother has been closer to the mark— when you see your ugly temper in your precious son and everyone says sarcastically “wonder where that came from?”, when your daughter prays for “mama to not cry and honor her parents”, yeah, that hurts a little. But the children, at least for now, are still felt as such a fresh marvel of grace, that it’s hard for me not to glow in the glory of them, even when I am that parent with the screaming toddler on aisle seven (which does indeed happen from time to time).

But having a neighbor? Now that has been sanctifying. He is a good, decent, neighbor, but in my worst moments, like when I twisted my ankle trying to kick the dog while yelling at the children, I looked up and there he was, staring at me from the recliner on his porch. And then—can you believe it— there he is in church too, in the pew right behind us, seeing me in my Sunday best, but also knowing what I look like waddling around in my husbands t-shirt, or in my old nightgown chasing a chicken. All the other church members know theoretically that I need Jesus; he knows it truly.

We relate to each other most of the time exactly how we did there on the garden path:

“Oh! Sorry! Are you okay?” I ask this because he is old, which in my mind is something of a condition, and wondering around at night.

“Oh! Sorry! Are you okay?” He asks this because I am pregnant, which in his mind is something of a condition, and wondering around at night. 

Yes Yes Yes, we reply, and start making our exits sheepishly, only to find we are heading home on the same narrow path.

Do you need anything? I ask, not meaning to make him feel like a geriatric out of place, but probably doing just that.

“No. I’m just enjoying the night. The garden is beautiful,” he says, reminding me that he lives here, by-gum, same as me.

Ouch. Here is the rough and tumble, the uncomfortable sandpaper to my oblivious narcissism: This is not my world. My mother tried to tell me. This garden always needed more lovers, and now they have come. While I was called away to another front, He made the rocks cry out. And I am selfish enough to feel a bit hurt. 

Neither do these moments belong to me. It has taken me weeks to finish writing this and there is nothing brilliant about it. Every minute is interrupted, just like that second of twilight in the garden. God didn’t actually need me to be creatively inspired on my walk that evening; He gave me a chance to love my neighbor. He has filled my contemplation with people. They are more beautiful than anything I could come up with. 

We are doing our best to teach our children to stay in church with us throughout the whole service. This is important to me for many reasons. But perhaps the most obvious is that the children, with all their lack of perfection in such a situation, are part of the congregation, same as you and me, and I know by personal experience that they will only be seen as neighbors, truly, if they are actually there in the flesh. Their bodies are important in corporate worship, not just the idea of them, in some back room. But because parenting in the pew is hard, what I have to remind myself every Sunday is that this time of worship in the Lord’s house is not for me. It is not so that I will have a warm and spiritual feeling. It is not for me to be refueled. It is not a chance for me to socialize. It is not for me, even, to be taught and convicted by a sermon. It is for God. It is His service, something he enjoys, looks down and is glorified in. We come for Him. He does not mind their squirming. They do not bother Him. 

In the same way, I am stretched and I am learning to make room for my neighbor— to appreciate the way he wants to keep the yard, to laugh at myself when he exposes my red-neck tendencies and asks where are the children’s clothes? My dear Sarah, are you running a nudist colony?, to clean up my mess for his sake, to open the gate and move his laundry when I can, to share with him, however humble the offering, to try to see him as something of a marvel, as my children do: A stranger brought close, a gift to our membership.