Familiar Faces

This article was originally published in Kindred Magazine Vol. 1: Community in August 2019!

I’ve lived in the same house all 30 years of my life, nestled between my Gram and Pap’s house on the right and the house of my aunt with her family on the left. Three generations of one family as neighbors, creating an intimate community only joined through marriage or blood. Living so close to extended family has always proven to be a comfort and somewhat daunting depending on the day or the events surrounding us and as we’ve spent this year dealing with both planning a wedding and an unexpected funeral, two events known to bring families together or tear them apart, it’s never been more noticeable how true that is.

As a kid, I loved knowing everyone was practically on top of each other. I usually had my two older cousins and their friends to hang around with and play video games, build tree forts, or do high jumps off of the tire swing in my Pap’s backyard. Meanwhile, my Gram was always on call to babysit and I spent many an afternoon in her kitchen watching Days of Our Lives and eating biscotti after school waiting for my mom to get home from work. Though as I entered my teenage years I realized, having all of these extra eyes keeping watch maybe wasn’t as cool as I had originally thought. Mostly because I could never get away with throwing a top-notch rager of a party (a forlorn dream that my rule abiding, square personality would never have attempted in the first place.) So for half a decade, except for our annual Christmas Eve trek across the driveway and the occasional wave while grabbing the mail, I mostly kept to myself.

Since laboring through those awful, ‘don’t look at me, don’t talk to me’ puberty years, I’ve come to once again appreciate having my family next door and able to participate in momentous events so easily. After my engagement last year, my mom and aunt were giddy with the excitement of planning the whole thing, already getting together to talk about ideas before my fiancé and I had even made it Facebook official. While there are definitely days when I don’t want to have to answer wedding questions the second I walk into the kitchen in the morning or fake enthusiasm for parts of planning that aren’t all that important to me, I realize I’m lucky to have my mom and my aunt so involved and ready to help with everything from making paper flowers to bundling flatware any night of the week. Knowing that I can cross the yard to drop off a vase to my aunt instead of driving across town or having her swing by on her daily walk to my Pap’s just to check out the table runners is awesome. It makes me glad for her to be such a big part of this experience and able to share these memories with me and my mom.

But, amidst all of the wedding planning and decision making we were thrown a major curveball when this past spring, my mom’s husband unexpectedly passed away, sweeping the whole family into a whirlwind of picking up the pieces and the slack of his absence. A lot of people might think being surrounded by loved ones after a death is comforting, and sure, it definitely can be, but only at the right time. It’s difficult to wear a mask and guard your emotions, even at home, just because you never know when the sound of a quad’s engine revving means the arrival of an uninvited guest. My Pap means well but his constant presence can be overwhelming to my mother while she navigates her grief. When you share a driveway with the people closest to you, boundaries tend to blur and privacy can become almost non-existent.

While we traverse these two major life events happening within months of each other I can’t help but start thinking about the fact that I won’t be living in this little family community for much longer. The safety net of having people who love and care about me to the left and right will be stripped away and I’ll finally be forced to live like the average individual with neighbors who may be friendly but won’t feel like home. Of course moving away won’t make me any less a member of the family but now there will be a strangeness to coming home, not knowing the daily ins and outs and goings on. So though I may complain about the closeness of proximity and the lack of privacy, a part of me is still going to miss it. This is all I’ve ever known, and I doubt I’ll ever live in a situation like this again. But hey, at least I’ll save on gas when I head home for a visit.