Kindness Makes Us Neighbors

The playgrounds were still closed, so someone tied a swing to the branches of a street tree down my block. I know my neighbors now a little bit better than before. Aku, Natalie, Rachel, and me trade excess, Meyer lemons from my in-laws’ tree, plums from Aku’s partner’s neighbor’s in Oakland, a wheel of sourdough made by Natalie, extra onions from Rachel’s farm box. Emily brings by baked goods, stone fruit tart, brownies. When the library closes, Meng, Rhea, and I make each other into libraries, sharing the books we’ve bought from the local bookstore. Debbie gives us a bag of balloons to blow up for the baby, Shelly cuttings from her garden to plant in the yard. We grow chard and basil, and the rose plant I transplanted doesn’t die. An orchid I rescued from the trash starts opening, one by one, its wolf-faced blossoms.

We were taking an aimless loop around the neighborhood, my husband pushing my daughter in the stroller, a few days ago, when we noticed the sidewalk had been annotated, the trees named in white chalk by a pair of rogue botanists. Suddenly we were looking up in their branches, these huge, sedate, peaceful creatures, wattles from Australia, palms from Mexico, maples from Japan, a mimosa from Iran, but some, like oaks, from California. The botanist had made arrows on the sidewalk to follow, and we looked at each marked tree like we would study a painting in a museum—the stance of the body and the act of looking so achingly similar that it sharpened the beauty of the trees and the distance between now and the old days. A tree on a street I must have walked dozens of times in the last year, if not hundreds, suddenly revealed itself to be a champak tree, a “rare for SF, excellent specimen” native to South Asia, packed with slender yellow flowers and wide, scentless leaves, which I stroked with my fingers. This tree, I think, grew in my grandmother’s garden in Hyderabad—yet, on the other side of the world, here we both were.

This tree, I think, grew in my grandmother’s garden in Hyderabad—yet, on the other side of the world, here we both were.

I bike to parks with my daughter. The way she squats down with such ease to inspect a stone or insect on the ground, the grace of her body, always startles me as much as the keenness of her eye: a spider treading leg upon leg across the dusty path, a drop of black-speckled red limning a strand of long, yellow parted grass. People do not say hello here. Still, there are birds crying out with strange calls—I never listened to them before. Seabirds, crows, and ones darting and slender for which I do not have a name, but I’m looking at them now, my neighbors.

Ell brings home a tomato plant. Mary lived in my house before I did, and maybe died in it: it’s upon her line I hang the washed diapers to dry. On the other side of the fence, which I can see when I sit at the top of my stairs to drink a cup of wine with Aku on her facing steps, I see the neighbors’ squash plants blooming, my neighbor with the friendly dog and the pigtails sitting at the picnic table and drinking a cup of tea. We don’t know each other’s names, but we say hello now and stop to chat from our respective yards or when we pass each other on the street. On the other side of the other fence, a firefighter from the station next door throws me a big-hearted wave and jokingly asks me to join him on his run. Laura talks to me from her front steps: The baby came early, but he’s okay, they named him after a river. On a windy day, a letter to mail gets snatched out of my hand and a man goes chasing it for me down the street. The cashier calls me honey when she gives me my change. I give my dad a hug, wearing a mask, turning my face away from him.

These are the most terrible days I have lived through, disaster following on the heels of disaster, short bursts of emergency punctuating the long one at a pace that leaves me breathless. In the shock, in the fear of it, some things take on a new clarity: I am paying attention.

Rhea in the park: “I’m scared too. But I got you. I know you got me.” Her two-year-old wanders over to the garden, separated from the park by a wire fence; from the other side of the fence, a woman hands him down an enormous sunflower, whose face is bigger than his. In the evenings, children take turns on the swing the neighbor tied up for them; sometimes, I see grownups too, tipping their legs into the sky, laughing.

Will everything be alright, like I tell my daughter when she’s crying? I don’t know. I don’t believe in much right now. I don’t believe in much more than the beauty, grace, and kindness of my neighbors.

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