Neighbors.

We are a family that doesn't like a lot of neighbors.

My grandfather didn't like having neighbors around and they weren't even in view.  He met people coming over to our place with a shotgun in hand.  Don't drop in unannounced when he was in his Davy Crockett moods.  He begrudged people the travel past our farm.  We all stopped what we were doing and stared every car down that came along.

When we married, we had people packed to the rafters  on both sides of our little apartment conclave.   Play saxophone at the top of your lungs at 3 am?  Sure.  why not?

Leave your dog in the front unsupervised so the mailman had to throw the mail from the street for the whole building wrapped in rubber bands.  Be my guest.   (that was our contribution)

Have shouting matches and scream at each other and beat your kids with belt,  just the right tone for a Sunday morning sleep in.

Wonderful potlucks in the back, two buildings full of hippies and families chowing down, making music and sharing a living space a little more friendlier than the cold city streets.

So after a few years of that, we bought a  farm... deep, deep, in no neighbor territory.    If you weren't coming to see us, you were lost.

Oh we had the neighbors that came and milked their cows on the twenty acres cross the road.  Nice Christian people, sweet as could be, minded their own business, was always helpful to us.  We bought them out.   Ah peace at last.

After we sold our farm we moved around so much that neighbors didn't matter.  We didn't get the time to know our neighbors in lots of the places, but sometimes I would make a connection.  In one particular excellent old apartment building I fell in love with the neighbor upstairs.  She was an Polish Jewish Immigrant, an Orthodox or Observant Jew living according to the Torah in her daily life.  We talked and talked and she told me of the old country where her village had been wiped out by the Nazi's.  She told me of going up to Lake Michigan in the summer while her husband worked in the city, she and the children would bathe and relax at their summer cottage.  She taught me how to cook Kosher.  She never once tasted my cooking, but I often got bits and pieces a little  gnoshes from her.  I heard her go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she heard me exercising like a horse every morning at ten.

to be continued.