Community

I’m fortunate enough to have friends who treat me like family, no matter how much time passes between our seeing each other. They are people I can comfortably reveal myself to, and people whom I trust to take care of my kid. Trouble is, most of them live an hour away, in Portland, where I started putting down roots and where my husband and I cultivated ourselves before home prices nudged us out. We have a good life here, but I don’t often think about the village I moved away from.

It’s a village that began to fracture when COVID hit, when my son was just a baby, so he didn’t get to see much of my adult friends and their children of similar ages. But the village still exists, as I was reminded last month. My husband and I had tickets to a show in Portland and weren’t getting a response from the only non-family babysitter we had used in our town. I reached out to some friends I’d known for years, who lived near the show venue. Not only were they available, but they told me that their son, who had probably played with my son only once before, was excited about seeing his “old friend”. So we dropped off our kid there, and the boys played together just as easily as I hugged the friend I had scarcely seen since we left Portland. My partner and I chowed down on good BBQ before the show, and after the show we got some coffee from a late-night shop, which was thrilling coming from a town that mostly shuts down at six o’clock.

It wasn’t a big deal for my pals to babysit. I’m pretty sure they just set the boys in front of a movie, but the steady friendship that led to their willingness to help is what means a lot to me. I’d also watched their kid when he was just a wee baby, and I was more than happy to do it. Comes with being part of a community. I’ve felt that more acutely lately because, as I recently wrote, we lost one of our own to cancer. I’m not really close enough to our mutuals to have a text chain, or regular group gatherings, where we can mourn together and share memories. And many folks have left social media. Her death is still fresh, hanging like a heavy cloud that affects everyone in different ways. Some have easy shelter from the inevitable rain; some, like her partner, are drenched in it every day. I feel like I owe it to her to go for a walk in that rain, to share the sadness.

I know I’d be welcomed into that fold, just as I’ve been embraced at the rare times I’ve been able to attend a community event in the past six years, even when I feel like an outsider. My husband and I are building a new community here, in our smaller and less exciting city, but it’s still just a trickle of new people we’ve met through parenthood and neighborhood. I’m in a wildly different stage of life now than when I met most of my Portland friends in my twenties, and I know that part of what I’m feeling now is simply nostalgia. But I do wonder what our family is missing out on. Could I be dropping off my son for playdates every weekend, instead of a few times a year? Would he benefit from having a wider variety of adults present in our lives? Would he be more enthusiastic about learning to ride a bike, like many of my friends and their kids, and start training to be the bike touring buddy I’ve always wanted?

I’m sure I’m just daydreaming. My kid doesn’t need a huge circle of friends to thrive, and I don’t need the urban amenities of Portland to have a good life, although there’s a lot about it that I miss. Also, I prefer being solitary most of the time, so how often would I really participate in the social life I supposedly left behind? There’s no telling, but with circumstances in our country being as grim as they are, I feel like opening up those lines of connection a little more, even if it’s just letting people know I’m thinking of them sometimes.