It is morning and I am sitting in frigid air with quickly cooling coffee on the front steps of our house on East McKinley Street, a one-way that runs parallel to the river and the old railroad track turned bike path in our small town in southwestern Ohio. “It’s like Mayberry,” people remark when first visiting from the newer suburban subdivisions built just minutes away. 

The houses that line our streets are relics of bygone eras, some built two centuries ago by settlers who came westward after the Revolution, others developed in the middle of the last century by Appalachian migrants in search of factory jobs. 

This place feels familiar and comforting. But I can remember when it felt foreign, even though I grew up just fifteen minutes from here. In middle school, the stigma of this neighbourhood was gossiped about in whispers. We didn’t use the word “working-class” then, but we did use the word “grits,” and the grits lived here. 

How I ended up in this town is a story for another day. But since 2010, when my husband David and I moved to South Lebanon from New York City, we have lived in three homes on East McKinley Street. Our children know this place as their neighbourhood. 

It has been fascinating to watch them find their place here, especially Elizabeth, who is the most social of the bunch, our fifth-born of six and our only daughter. When she was two years old, just learning to talk, she started to ask, “Mommy, can we go to the neighbourhood?” Her frequent request charmed me. She had no self-consciousness about knocking on a door. Her phrase “go to the neighbourhood,” as opposed to naming individual neighbours, suggested an early worldview less focused on delineation and boundaries and more aware of underlying connections. The neighbourhood was a larger entity to which she and these neighbours belonged, a formed whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

The sight of this toddler in a sparkly pink tutu and Paw Patrol sneakers bulldozing norms of privacy and leading me deeper into the lives of neighbours felt especially audacious because, as Americana as this town is, upon one’s first visit it can feel foreboding. The bright yellow Gadsden flag whips in the wind off front porches. My daughter cannot read yet, but if she could, some of the signs she would see include warnings about trespassing and soliciting and also, no kidding, the more abrupt: “Go Away.” On what appears to be a welcome wreath reads, “Welcome-ish. Depends on who you are and how long you stay.” On one porch there sits a homemade boot rack and above it a stenciled sign: “We don’t dial 911.” 

The array of signs erects a privacy fence. Yet there is also a shirt-off-the-back magnanimity here, something that my daughter’s social persistence has unwrapped in the form of the many gifts she’s received from those who open their door to us—a porcelain doll, a polished mirror, candies, games. 

In small-town America there’s a John Wayne preference for independence and a life lived laissez-faire, yet an equally John Wayne big-hearted conviction about the rightness of taking risks to help a neighbour in need. In the 1971 film Big Jake, Wayne’s character, Jacob McCandles, begins a scene uttering an injunction against interfering in other people’s business. When he sees a young boy struggle to fight back against his captors, McCandles—despite his sermonizing about minding his own business—sighs and rides down to save the day. I’ve wondered whether one of the virtues of this convoluted approach to neighbourly aid—one that on the surface prizes one’s own business but whose gruffness really obscures a soft heart—is that it lets the recipient keep their own dignity in a way not as possible when charity is given more directly. 

My neighbours talk one way and live another. They begrudgingly welcome down-and-out family members into their homes for indefinite stays, they adopt children after a cousin dies of an overdose, they raise their grandchildren, they check in on each other and drop off groceries and take out the trash for the wheelchair-bound. They yell at the school-aged boy who has a habit of dashing across the street without looking for cars—lecturing him because “it would break my heart if something happened to you.” 

It’s a place where even neighbours you seldom see are watching, as Marlene, wheelchair-bound, told my four-year-old daughter tenderly when they first met, “Honey, I’ve watched you grow up through my window.” 

No one embodies this paradox of privacy and care more than Ruby and Gil. (I have used pseudonyms for my neighbours to protect their privacy.) Our regular visits started with bread and fruit on a bleak winter’s day. Ruby called to say that they had received more from the county Meals on Wheels program than they could eat, and would we like the extra? Also, she had a trinket for Elizabeth. Given the regular schedule of the delivery service, our visits became ritualized, a treasured part of our week. “Mommy, can we go to the neighbourhood?” often meant visiting Gil and Ruby. 

Now in their eighties, Appalachian migrants who’ve worked their way into the life they now live, Gil and Ruby are the kind of people who worry about the weeds, whose lawn is always tidy, whose plot and headstone are bought and paid for. 

They are the keepers of orderly lives. The inside of their ranch home, white with black shutters, is as tidy as the outside. One enters immediately into a finished porch with dark 1970s panelling and a desk at which Gil sits and puts on his spectacles to pay his bills and sort his receipts. (Once the couple gave us a futon they had purchased in the nineties; along with it they gave us the yellowed owner’s manual and the receipt from the furniture store.) 

Gil’s porch office opens into the living room, a soft, glowing room of greens and greys, with handmade doilies and Christian inspiration gracing coffee tables, spider plants with long tendrils hanging by the sheer white curtains that let in the light and match the luminescence of Ruby’s permed silver-white hair. There’s an antique toy truck on the shelf, a grandson’s famed home-run ball, rows and rows of family pictures. I feel like I am in my grandparents’ home; I want to stay here as long as possible, as long as Lizzie’s patience will allow as she sits on the floral couch, coat on and zipped up stiffly to her neck, shoes on and quiet but starting to fidget.

It’s been nearly fifteen years since I first moved here. How did I miss these people for so long? These figures who tower like maples on our street, planted here this past half century? 

Ruby is gathering up the bread and fruit for us. She wants to double-bag it for our walk home in case the weight of the oranges rips a seam, and so she goes to her pantry and pulls out a tiny tower of plastic grocery bags, each bag folded neatly into a square origami-style and stacked one on top of the next. I can’t remember how the meticulously folded bags balanced so perfectly in this tower within her hands. To my mind’s eye it seems some kind of magic; I’m wondering now whether it involved rubber bands. 

In the kitchen Gil is making breakfast. The kitchen is a warm flush of browns and reds and golds. Pine cabinets, with rose gold hardware, everything spic and span. Gil stands at the stove in red plaid flannel tucked into brown corduroys with a belt around his waist and slippers on his feet. His breakfast routine is marked by the same caring precision with which he tends his lawn and pays his bills. He fries his egg in a six-inch Teflon pan, salts and peppers it, mixes instant coffee in his white mug. 

“I’m a little behind schedule today,” he says. He is not in a hurry; rather, his every movement is measured, and he is aware of the variation only because his life at this stage is so patterned. “Ruby did the cooking when I worked,” he tells me, smiling. “Now it’s my turn to cook for her.” 

For reasons I don’t fully understand, this to me is a pearl of a moment. I keep it and ponder it. It is so intimate, and so ordinary. It strikes me that perhaps there is nothing so private as watching a person make their breakfast, go about their morning routine, unload the dishwasher. 

And by this, I mean privacy in the good and sacred sense: a life cloaked by a modest and dignified reticence, a hiddenness that enhances holiness. For a good deed in private can more easily be what it is, less prone to artifice. While it’s true that sin loses power when exposed to the light, we also instinctively know that something is off when a person pays no attention to the orange cones of personal boundaries and instead backs right over them, or when a stranger overshares something better suited for a loved one. 

I am reminded of British mystic Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God, in which she writes that man “needs a reasonable measure of solitude, and he has the right to the secrets of his own soul.” She also writes, 

This holy hiddenness contrasts with the kinds of privacy claims that by strident assertion mar beauty and tend to alienate. There is a back road not far from here with a row of trees that form a tunnel of sorts with their branches, and I go out of my way to drive there because it’s so lovely. The road is public, but apparently the land is not, for upon my last visit I was annoyed to see an ugly black and white “PRIVATE PROPERTY” sign stapled into the flank of the foremost tree. 

There is a privacy that protects what is good and honours what is sacred, and there is a privacy that excludes some in order to ensure maximum pleasure and comfort for oneself. The honest question, of course, is, Where does the one begin and the other end? What is this “reasonable measure of solitude” that Houselander refers to? When are we called to retreat to interior castles, and when are we called to go outside ourselves? How can we judge what is right when measures of privacy are moving targets relative to culture, and when the arc of culture seems to bend toward isolation? 

As winter melts away, Elizabeth meets her new best friend—another four-year-old girl who lives on our street with her mom, dad, and baby brother. This family is facing eviction after failing to pay property taxes. When Elizabeth and I knock on their door, we notice paint clawed away on the bottom half by what looks like the pawing of dogs. There is a strong odour like sewage. As the door opens, roaches scatter underfoot. 

The contents of this family’s life now spill out onto the front porch in overflowing plastic tubs and laundry baskets. “Now we just have to decide if we are taking the eight-foot-long caterpillar with us,” the mother jests about the absurdly large stuffed animal sprawled out on their driveway. I imagine what would happen if they showed up at the shelter with that thing. 

It’s disorienting sometimes, living in a place where contentment and sorrow are neighbours, where the spectrum of human experience can be seen on any given day on different porches of the same street. It’s a reality that can be kept out of sight in so many places, but not here. Here it hangs out in the open, loitering. 

“Is everything okay at the house down there?” my next-door neighbours ask me. “There was terrible screaming down there this morning. Like, a lot.” 

The neighbourly concern that comes too late. This struggle should not have been kept private so long. We might have helped. 

In the kindest of goodbye notes, on a yellow legal pad this family pens, “We wish that we didn’t have to move away from here. We don’t like to leave people like you. P.S. Take care of each other.” 

Elizabeth asks why we can’t buy her friend a new house so that they can be our neighbours again. Could we at least get them a car so they can visit? 

How difficult it is to evade the isolation of our age! The pull of privacy, like gravity, works on us. The older we get, the more there is to be ashamed of, resentful about, more reason to stay guarded. Childlike openness narrows. 

Over the summer I notice that Elizabeth, now four, rarely asks to visit the neighbourhood anymore. I assume this is natural along the progression of child development; I wonder whether Erikson’s psychosocial stages would shed some light on this change, might explain how a child grows into herself, becomes more aware of her separateness, as we all do, as she should. 

Yesterday we were at the park, the sun casting that peculiarly autumn light. There was an acquaintance there. I intended to say hi, but he was engrossed in play with his sons and our eyes never met, though there was at times the feeling of glancing, the dance between initiative and hesitation. 

One of the sons, about five years old, was spinning in a futuristic-looking pod and called to his dad for a push when the pod’s whir stilled. His dad was kicking a soccer ball with an older boy, so I pushed the boy instead for a few moments, somewhat awkwardly, because he was shy and a little uncertain. Is this my place to tread, or do I trespass here? 

He hopped off and ran off. Elizabeth looked at me, puzzled. On the walk home she asked me, “Why were you pushing him, Mom? He’s not your kid.” 

She’s learning our norms and our culture, even as I’m trying to decide which ways to unlearn. I’m trying to understand the difference between solitude and isolation—a distinction that is hard to parse in the pressures of day-to-day living. Ben Palpant, in an essay titled “On Community and Solitude in the Work of Writing,” helps me out: 

In a world with so much privacy, we have so little solitude. I have started to ask myself in some of the most mundane moments of decision: Is the privacy I’m seeking for the sake of solitude or isolation? 

As if in answer to these questions, our neighbourhood is changing. Rising housing costs have pushed more people out of the city and into our town, and our street has become more diverse—a woman from South America, a family from Africa, a black man and his kids from the city. Most recently, a brother and sister from Kharkiv, Ukraine, moved into one-half of the duplex next door. All of a sudden, the world feels smaller; our neighbourhood, more expansive. 

After school one day our boys are playing baseball in the backyard when they suddenly come running to let me know that our newest neighbour needs something. Sveta, middle-aged with cropped dark hair, is on the other side of the chain-link fence. There is something that she needs, but she doesn’t know the English word. “Lopata,” she says repeatedly. 

It’s a strange feeling to search someone’s face and to see them searching yours, each with goodwill and expectation, but to repeatedly bump against a wall of air, a void of understanding. Finally, Sveta suggests that I pull out my phone. Google Translate. “Lopata.” Russian for shovel. 

This opens up a torrent of communication. Now we can speak. “I will go home when the war is over,” the picture on my phone of Sveta’s Russian writing is translated. 

Perhaps part cultural difference, perhaps because of her disability (Sveta’s brother tells us about this one evening), Sveta’s barriers of privacy are low. To me the timing seems providential, as I’m praying about my own grasping for control, praying for more graces of hospitality and communion. 

But I was still surprised the first time she walked into our house unannounced. I didn’t have the screen door locked. She came right in, cupping candies in her hands. “Amber, I knocked but you didn’t answer.” At first I thought it was a fluke, but I soon learned it to be her habit. Elizabeth looks surprised to see her walk through the door on her own. She’s shy when Sveta greets her with affectionate clucks and coos. 

I try to remember to lock the door if I need the solitude or want a minute to collect myself before greeting her. But this day I forget, and at a busy time of day for me, as I’m prepping dinner and feeling the time crunch between school and evening activities, Sveta walks in. I don’t feel I can drop what I’m doing, and I’m internally annoyed by what I assume is her expectation that I will. After a few minutes, I tell her with a forced smile that I need to make dinner. I go back to the kitchen, figuring she will get the hint and leave. But she follows me there and stands as I pour waffle batter into the iron. 

I’m tense. But at some point I accept that she is standing here talking to me, or rather writing things down and taking photos and translating. And I am doing what I need to do. The waffles are getting made. The children are playing, and she is sometimes fetching things for them, and they are on better behaviour than usual because a guest is here. Inside I feel something shift, like snow melting in winter. I start to relax. I notice that this is actually wonderful, having adult company while I am making dinner. 

Leah Libresco Sargeant, in her book Building the Benedict Option, asks the following: What do I do alone that I could do with others? What do I do in private that I could do in public? These questions won’t leave me alone, even as I struggle with their implications. I’ve lived in seasons of outreach, with many moments given to neighbours, and found myself depleted, short-tempered with my own family, yearning for quiet. I’ve also lived in the comfortable isolation that seems the default of our age, and felt my soul grow small. 

The research tells us what we’re losing. Policy researcher Thomas O’Rourke notes that while time with family and friends remains steady, our neighbourly relationships have plummeted alongside social trust. “Over the past 50 years,” he writes, “we have become about half as likely to spend any social time with our neighbours; we’ve also become half as likely to trust our fellow Americans.” 

Yet knowing this doesn’t resolve the daily tensions: when to welcome the unscheduled knock, when to protect the peace of home? When to join the impromptu gathering on someone’s porch, when to retreat to read or pray or simply be? I’m learning—still learning—that neighbourliness and solitude may not be the opposites they first appear. “I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness,” writes the narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, “but that is how it always was for me in those days.” Perhaps they are twin antidotes to isolation—each incomplete without the other. 

My daughter at two, with her unguarded way of moving through the neighbourhood, showed me something I’m still trying to understand. So does Sveta with her unexpected visits, Gil with his measured morning routine, the evicted family with their poignant note: P.S. Take care of each other. The challenge isn’t simply to “be more neighbourly” but to find the rhythm between engagement and retreat, between the gift of presence and the gift of space. I’m still learning this dance, still stumbling through its steps—even, or especially, when the signs say “Go Away.”