The trifecta is now complete: after meeting neighbors right and left, I have finally had over the neighbor across the street. It’s more of an accomplishment than it sounds. The house across the street is actually the Amherst Women’s Club, which is an Italianate mansion from the nineteenth century that is now used mostly for meetings and parties. It took me several weeks to realize that people actually lived there.
Some of them are students who come and go more quickly than we could keep track of. A young man and woman (I feel old even using that phrase!–but they are awfully fresh-faced) live there more permanently as caretakers. It was they who tipped me off to the presence of the real long-term resident across the street: the original caretaker’s daughter, now somewhere well past eighty, back in her childhood home once more.
She only had to come across the street, but several snowstorms and a mighty full social calendar for an octogenarian delayed our meeting until just recently. But it was worth the wait. She knows it all. She can remember our house being built somewhere around 1930. She can remember almost everyone who’s lived here. She can tell me what used to grow in the yard. (And, I discovered, she can tell me when we turn our lights off for the night.)
There was once an apple orchard here. The man who cut it down and built this house planned to welcome his new wife across the threshold within the year. They were a little bit older; they thought they knew what to expect. But nothing worked out as they’d planned, and their marriage withered quickly. He was left alone, exiled from the happiness he’d planned.
My neighbor in the present has attuned me to the neighbors in the past. The little boy, just about Lucy’s age, who loved to talk, like she does. The pair of lawyers. The Orthodox rabbi who lived here just before us, leaving gaping nail holes on every doorway where the Mezuzah, the scroll with Torah verses, was hung. One of the little scrolls remains by the front door, in fact. We thought it had been forgotten, but then someone told us that the rabbi probably intended to leave it for our benefit.
It is our house, isn’t it? In all kinds of different ways. I look at all the markings time has left and try to figure out just what we have inherited. I buy more tea and hope that I can entice our neighbor across our doorway once again. And I think about planting an apple tree this spring, in our own little paradise, lost and found.
