More flight

Kathleen moved to the suburbs. She protested the move energetically, stating she didn’t want to leave the neighborhood, but she and her new boyfriend wanted to live together and they needed a bigger house that had a dry basement.

“He has a lot of hobbies,” she explained. “Otherwise, he’d move in here.” Various neighbors tried to convince her to stay; she was popular, but her house went up for sale anyway.

With Mary and Donald gone and now Kathleen leaving, I considered selling my house as well. The common wisdom was as long as you had good neighbors next door, you were okay. If a house two doors down played loud music or sold drugs, you had a safety zone, but if it was the house next door, you were in trouble. I’d had Ronald on one side, Kathleen on the other and things and what if Kathleen’s house sold to a party animal? I should move, too, but I didn’t want to move and why should I move when I loved my house and I was not the problem? The problem people should move. We would make them; I would stay and we would save the neighborhood.

Kathleen’s house sold to Martha, a single black woman raising two kids on some kind of disability income. “I told her about the block club,” said Kathleen over the fence. “She’s excited about it, she said she wanted to come.”

“Great! It’ll be good to have another black neighbor coming. It’s so weird, a bunch of white people meeting to talk about the problems on a mixed race block.”

“She’s living now in those low-rent highrises on the near north. She’s excited about having a yard and garden.”

“Yeah, I moved in from an apartment,” I said. “First thing I did was plant flowers.” The flowers I had planted had not done well, nonetheless, my yard was loaded with Johnny jump-ups, phlox and poppies. They blew from yard to yard, seeding themselves and greeting the neighbors gaily and indiscriminantly. Kathleen looked about at the houses and the street wistfully. “I feel unfinished. It’s so beautiful here. Real salt of the earth people. I told Martha about the compost I started in back and she was excited about that, too.”