What the pandemic hath wrought

I can remember at some point in maybe 2019 (nope – it was April 2018, I wrote briefly about it!) marveling about how we had landed right where I wanted to be. A neighborhood where our kids ran in packs with the neighborhood kids, and ate dinner at whatever house they happened to be in at dinner time. Weekend happy hour on the back porch with neighbors across the street, their house or ours . . . taking the neighbor kid along to family outings as part of our pack . . . the casual intimacy of running in and out of each others’ day to day life. Intimacy-by-proximity.

It’s never come back, after covid. The main neighbors who were sort of “gateway friends” to everyone else really retreated. They were responsible for the care of her elderly, immunocompromised mother, so we showed our care by keeping space and distance, and though the infection has subsided we never have managed to shorten that distance to pre-pandemic closeness. There’s some PTSD at play, social anxiety on both sides, and for them the genuine exhaustion that comes with eldercare for a very challenging elder (personality-wise as well as health-wise). All of the boys were forced to socialize only online for years during lockdown, and although ours have been pulled back into society through school and activities, the boy across the street often still attends virtual school and plays online with virtual friends and they haven’t really found each other out on the street again. Anyhow in a few months they are moving to Rhode Island. The pandemic caused that, too – New Orleans has never been fantastically-run but covid knocked it back even more, and these neighbors needed somewhere more reliable with school for their son and healthcare for the elderly mother. They bought a 300-year old house and have used their skills as craft laborers to renovate it, and when they move into it this summer they will rent out their place across the street to a friend of theirs, single, no kids.

Mortgage rates and housing prices and jobs and inertia and inflation mean we are stuck here for the time being, for a long time probably, and I’ve been working to embrace a sense of renewal about it. Honestly in just a couple of years Jack will be gone and we will have a guest room again, and a couple years after that BOOP two guest rooms as Liam leaves us for college, so maybe we will end up living in this house for a good long time. And maybe that couple years of kids in and out of everyone’s front door is all we get to have.

There are worse losses to grieve, and I’m not wallowing tonight. It is 70 degrees and the nodding blooms in my backyard window boxes are so heavy and fragrant. Birds are chirping and whooping, it is 6:00 pm and still light. Jasper suddenly appeared and furiously dug a hole in a fit of productivity then disappeared inside just as quickly. He is asleep on the hardwood floor in the living room, where Craig watches baseball on the tv and the Prof does the dishes. It’s salmon for dinner tonight. I’ll go in and make it in a minute.