I’ve accidentally become a friendly neighbor. Well, just to one person. And I don’t actually know where he lives, so he may technically not be my neighbor. But back in the fall we crossed paths in the exact same spot on my way home from work several weeks in a row—him on his bicycle, me on foot, at the roundabout outside the daycare. I noticed how he rode at a leisurely pace, never in a rush, and always with a pleasant look on his face, a friendly dad mustache, and a Boar’s Head deli t-shirt. (I think he works at the deli.)
At some point we started exchanging small, polite smiles and gradually built up to actual eye contact and then to full smiles, waves, and verbal hellos. Yesterday, he got out a full “Hi, how are you?” and I gave a big wave and “Hi! Doing well,” before his casual cycling took him past me.
It’s become a lovely little routine and it brightens my day every time. There’s no expectation of stopping for small talk about the weather—just a quick moment of shared delight that we recognize each other and a true exchange of goodwill.
I’ve known people who are naturally friendly and develop neighborly rapport seemingly without effort. Historically, that has not been me. I avoid the laundry room on my hall if there’s someone in there. I’m hit or miss on eye contact with people at checkouts. My head? Down. Me? Going about my business.
When the directive came down in the fall that we federal employees would lose our hybrid work option, I dreaded having to commute to the office five days a week. Of course it’s really not that bad, all things considered: fifteen minute walk to the metro, maximum five minute wait for a train, and a twenty minute ride to my stop, which is directly underneath my building. I’ll take that over driving in DC traffic every time.
And in these last six months or so, I’ve come to appreciate the bookends to my day these commutes are, especially the walking bits—breathing the fresh air, moving my body, seeing the sky. I notice the seasons change in ways I didn’t when I drive to work or worked from home:
The differences in the amount of light left in the sky when I get to the top of the escalator at my station day by day. The first time I use sunglasses for my walk down an east-west street, after a winter of walking home in the dark. My attention shifting from lit-up living rooms in fancy houses to the budding trees by mailboxes outside. The first crocuses right along that one fence. That front garden that is all hostas, each with little signs labeling their varietal (I imagine a hosta scientist lives there—there’s truly so many varieties of hostas and only varieties of hostas).
That one stretch of sidewalk that gets covered in acorns in the fall. (I grab the smallest one I can find with its cap still on to add to my dish of miscellaneous treasures, one for each year I’ve lived here). The basketball hoop where the two brothers put all their weight behind the ball just to barely clip the rim and where I step around traces of chalk hopscotch grids and drawings of rocket ships.
Come summer, I’ll be on the lookout for lantern flies embarking on their warm-weather campaign, doing my part to harry them as they tear down the East Coast like Napoleon through Europe. Unfortunately my winter work shoes are much better for stomping.
Sometimes there are dead rats and dog poop. But there’s also two neighbor kids who throw footballs with their dads and kick soccer balls with their moms before school in the middle of a quiet street, and the one stretch of curb I walk like a balance beam, and flags for college sports teams from all over the country, and one house that looks like a cottage.
And every day, at about 6:05pm, my neighbor waving to me on his bike.
Christina Ribbens (’19) studied history, studio art, and data science at Calvin and public humanities at Georgetown. She now lives in the part of Virginia that’s almost Washington, DC where she helps award grants to arts nonprofits. She takes a lot of walks to admire the landscaping in peoples’ front yards, mostly listens to British comedians’ podcasts, and likes to make friends via sports.
