City Neighbors: How Close is Too Close

The person across the driveway has hung coverings on her kitchen windows. Not curtains, maybe towels.

Her other windows are bare and so are the rooms, but there are things in her kitchen, the normal things like cupboards and a stove, but also a bird in a very large cage that sits at another window.

The house next door is a duplex with an upper and a lower. We know the people who live upstairs but not the new tenant downstairs. We’ve not met but our kitchens have been friends for, oh what, forty years. This is the first time the windows have been covered.

I wonder if she put up the window coverings because she was tired of watching me line dance in my kitchen while I wait for the eggs to boil. Or maybe she was disgusted by my stealthily eating huge tablespoonfuls of my remarkable scalloped potatoes and then wiping my chin with my denim shirt.

Maybe she thought I was looking at her. That could prompt her wanting to cover up. I’d be surprised by that since I am mindful of looking at neighbors, figuring everyone wants to believe they live on ten acres surrounded by rolling hills and plenty of trees. I myself feel that way, except I don’t. I like having neighbors, someone to greet, someone to wave to, though I’m not much for conversation.

The neighbor on our other side is middle-aged but we have known him since he was a boy. He irks us with his massive pile of cardboard boxes just outside his back door but then surprises with acts of kindness like bringing over a bowl of tomatoes or a gadget he thought we’d appreciate. “I thought you might want to use this,” he’ll say. Once when our kids were little, they had a water fight with that neighbor that involved him taking the screen off his upstairs window and dumping buckets of water on them while they fired at him with squirt guns.

He leaves his backdoor ajar so his big hound can come and go and he doesn’t have to get up every time she barks. I like that. It feels homey, like he trusts that no one’s going to come up on his little porch and steal the jars of spaghetti sauce he has cooling on the railing. He doesn’t have curtains on his kitchen window just a row of Christmas cards on the sill.

We live in a big city where the lots are very narrow. We are separated from each neighbor by about the width of a driveway. We could take a rope and string a large American flag between our two houses. I know this because this is something we’ve done. We are used to close quarters and have learned to not be bothered by the proximity of others.

Still, that the one neighbor’s kitchen windows are now covered gives me pause. She’s probably not from here. Still, when I see her in person, maybe in the spring, I will be sure to introduce myself and compliment her bird, that is, if I can get a closer look.