Welcome to the Hermitage

Larry and I are not good neighbors. Don't get me wrong--we're not obnoxious, loud, or messy. I don't think that anyone minds us living next door or across the street. But we are not very good neighbors all the same. We're not mean or rude, but neither do we go out of our way to be very friendly. We often don't even know names of people living around us. We're not the big-barbecue types or even the hang-out-in-the-front-yard-and-chat-with-passersby types. We rarely give any useful or meaningful service simply because we aren't aware of our neighbors' needs.

There are several reasons for this. Maybe they are really excuses, but I'm calling them reasons. Larry's health ranks high on the list. He rarely has energy for the people we know already, or our own family for that matter, let alone energy to go meet more.

Another reason is all of the volunteer work that I do in relation to the kids. This gets me meeting people in other places, but not in my neighborhood. I'm often gone more than home. The time spent at home is therefore precious: full of getting homework and chores and cooking and cleaning done--or at least worked-on. Soccer season, which for our family is August-November, is the worst. Moving to a remote area hasn't helped with that, either. A 50 minute round-trip to the grocery store doesn't help at-home time.

Things were a little better in the previous town we lived in. There were very nice people and lots of children on our street, which was great, but my kids attended a school out of our boundaries within the same District. So there again, we were largely playing and volunteering with people elsewhere.

Our current neighborhood has been interesting. Ours are the only kids on our end of the 1-1/2 mile long street that we live on. Everyone else is retired or nearly retired. I met one neighbor when we first moved in, an electrician who came to switch our drier to work with the propane hook-up. They live two houses down, he and his wife. I saw him again once when he came to fix my dishwasher about a year later. Now their house is on the market. (Any friends or family interested in being our neighbors, let me know. I promise we'll be great neighbors if we KNOW you.)

Our next door neighbor we "met" when last 4th of July she drunkenly called my children all sorts of profanities from her back porch because she thought they were playing too loudly in our pool. We met her truely this fall when her live-in guy knocked down a rather large oak tree in our front yard with a run-away Ford Explorer and another fantastic round of explatives. She apologized for our last encounter, we chatted for a few minutes, and now rather than hate her with every fiber of my being, I just feel tremendous pitty for her. I haven't seen her since.

But that's it, that's all we have met in almost two years here. I will readily admit that we have not yet ventured out to introduce ourselves. I did have cookie plates all made up to go around this Christmas, but Larry got sick, and I can't bring myself to do that sort of thing without him along. The cookies got thrown out after a couple of weeks sitting on our window sill. Anyway, I always thought that introductions were the main repsonsibility of those already living in a place. Maybe I need to get my head out of Jane Austen novels and Andy Griffith Show re-runs long enough to check if that is still the case.

Ultimately, however, none of this means very much. Ultimately, the fact is that I married a hermit. He had even disclosed that information pre-nuptually, but I didn't believe him. He was always incredibly outgoing with my apartment and in other situations that I saw him in. When he wants to, he can still be very social. He just doesn't want to be very often. And I have found that it is much easier to become a hermit onesself than to socialize someone else.