What Happiness Looks Like, part II
“Mom! Tom’s on the roof of our garage!” Clarke calls from the kitchen. I walk over and peer up through the window, and sure enough, there is an extension ladder propped up against my garage and Tom, my next door neighbor, is up there. I go upstairs and lean out my bedroom window. He has a shovel and is scraping the moss off, as well as throwing down the collection of missing balls batted up by the kids over the course of the summer.
I say hi. “Hope this is all right?” he says. See, the thing is, I live on this block in NE Portland, this tiny little coordinate of geography where every single person in every single house is special. And I am really not sure how this happened to me. At a certain point I stopped wondering why, and figured out how to simply be grateful for standing where I stand, for home.
*
Cynthia, my other neighbor, stops me as I’m getting into my car one day, and hands me a gift bag with pretty tissue paper. Inside is fancy loose-leaf tea and a diffuser. She knows I love tea. And she knows my heart just got beaten up pretty badly as I’ve been moping about mowing the lawn and watering my flowers. This one had potential. Such music I felt in this one. And she knows that. “Just wanted to cheer you up a little,” she says.
*
Clarke has had his first CT scan. He is 18 months old. And the hospital sent us home too early. And he is starting to react to the anesthesia. His torso is burning and fever spiking a degree a minute, while his extremities are ice cold and turning brownish blue. The pediatrician on-call says it will be quicker to drive him to ER, since we live near a hospital, than to wait for an ambulance. They said stop whatever you’re doing and go now. Cynthia is out working in her yard. I simply hand her my three year old, Sophie. It is the single worst day of my life. Every single piece of life as I knew it, every part of me, changed on that day. And I am not sure where Sophie will eat or sleep, but I do know she will be fine. And she is. She stays the night at Linda and Ken’s, Linda takes a picture for me of Soph and Natalie, their daughter, leaning against each other having fallen asleep on the couch watching a movie, Sophie wearing a pair of Natalie’s jammies.
*
Many years ago, the week of my divorce, I am unloading groceries from the back of my car. The toddlers are still in their car seats so I can keep them contained while I run the bags up to the porch. I am still learning how to do this solo, and in what steps to manage the most mundane of activities so the kids are safe, the chores get finished, and I don’t go crazy. But today, I just signed papers. And today sucks. And I start to cry and stop unloading the groceries and am just standing there. And Linda must have seen me from her window across the street, cause a few moments later I feel this hand on my back and she says, “Take the kids in, let me handle the groceries.” So together we get the kids and bags inside. She will not let me unpack them, she does it herself.
*
My favorite summer days are when a gaggle of neighbor kids are in the backyard with the hose and popsicles, and the guinea pigs, Clara Sasha and Nutcracker Prince Harold are brought outside in their little corrals, and neighbor girl Nora brings over her guinea pig, Taxi Buttons, and my neighbor Kathleen and I talk over the fence about our lives. We really do this. And we often send a kid over for a cup of sugar, too. Seriously. And someday I think Nora and Clarkie will get married.
*
In the winter Kathleen and I switch from talking over our backyard fence, to talking over the laurel hedge that divides our two front porches. Early December, every single year, she stands and giggles while I string, re-string, cuss, climb down the ladder, climb up the ladder, re-string, cuss some more, and attempt to hang my Christmas lights. I have labeled the lights which strings go on which part of the house, and which ends go into which outlets and which ends need the extension cord. And every single year I screw it up and have to start all over, and it’s always raining and cold, and Kathleen always laughs at me, and it always makes me smile at myself and stop cussing.
*
There is such a thing called $5 runs. This is where you go running very fast and up very big hills for exactly one hour because it is the only thing that allows sleep at night and that keeps one’s back from locking up. And it is the only hour of the day that is one’s own for a certain life chapter. And it is the only hour of the day when one can think. And every major decision for a decade happens on these runs. And every major problem gets figured out on these runs. And it becomes sacred. It becomes survival. And so you have amassed a critically necessary army of neighbor girls to whom you pay $5 for a run and they come watch the babies. And these girls are named Brittany, Alice, Emily, Lauren, and Eileen. And I seriously could not have made it through a very long decade without them. The funny thing is, by the end of the decade they had become $10 runs.
*
There are many more intersecting stories and days and conversations on the map of this block. And they’re all like the ones above. I’ve received advice, soup, hugs, laughs, homemade bread, borrowed garden tools, you name it, from Connie, Dennis, David and the other Tom, Julie and the other David, Amy, Christine… I think my friend Eric is right about setting up luck, that a good life is not passive, it is built. And how we build it is a choice, a series of choices for who to be, who to surround ourselves with, where to place value and time and effort, and how to mold the shape and course of the days we have. And that includes the geography of home.
But I have also come to believe that occasionally we land where we land despite ourselves, or any intention. And sometimes it’s bad—we’re born into the middle of a war zone. And sometimes it’s a quiet block in NE Portland where we’re all just helping each other live our lives. And whether we call it luck, or grace, or random alignment of circumstance, all I know is that on the darkest of nights over the past 11 years, when I give up on sleep, usually around 3 am, I wrap a blanket around myself and go sit on my front porch. And that’s where I land when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when everything seems either hopeless or possible. And often there are stars. And the windows of the houses lining this block are dark. But I know in a few hours one by one, the lights will click on, the coffee will be made, the children will pad out into the kitchen, and slowly the pace of day will unwind, and by about 7:45 most of us are in our driveways buckling in the kids and racing off to school or work. And we repeat this circle of day over and over. And this is one of the few things I happen to know, that I can count on. And the topography fills in around our hearts as we lose, maintain, find. And the simplest acts—Cynthia taking a moment to water my flowers, too, after she finishes hers—becomes the curve of the earth, the part that holds everything together, that keeps the ocean from spilling over the side, and turns landscape into story into home into the rest of our life.