Mourning the End of an Era

Our next-door neighbors are moving away.

And though I know it’s nothing personal, the “For Sale” sign jutting up from their front lawn feels like a knife through the heart of my family.

It’s not just that we’ll miss them, although we will. It’s not just that we worry about who’ll take their place, although we do.

It’s that so much of our lives has been bound up with theirs. Losing them is costing us our history.

And it’s the fear we have of the end of an era; the unraveling of our circle of families; the realization that our neighborhood, like many, has its own precarious fragility.

They’re sprouting up and down our street--”For Sale” signs heralding not just the one-two punch of low interest rates and rising equity, but new possibilities for mobility among Southern Californians long held hostage by a flat real estate market, and now restless to pack and go.

I knew it was inevitable, yet it rattles me. I’d grown accustomed to stability, bought into the notion that--on my block, at least--like family, we would grow old together happily.

I think back to the Midwest, where I grew up, when a neighborhood--not just a home--was a touchstone for its families. Back then, homes were bought as anchors, not investments.

You moved in and stayed put . . . for generations, maybe. And a neighborhood’s character took its shape over time, so comings and goings barely dented its identity.

Today, the average family stays in one home for five years . . . moving up, out, away so quickly that neighborhoods grow with roots too shallow to hold them steady against the winds of change.

And, here--where “communities” spring up overnight, their cookie-cutter houses lining newly paved streets--neighbors seem to move through so quickly that we don’t bother even to get to know them but insulate ourselves from change through retreat.

We confront this change in our neighborhood uneasily. What will the new people be like, my children worry? Will they be friendly, speak English? Will they have kids to join us jumping rope and roller-blading? Will they mind the noise of our basketball, our barking dog?

Will they change our neighborhood, or will they fit it . . . whatever that means? We’re not a street that does block parties or picnics; we’re not chummy in that Norman Rockwell kind of way.

Yet, we’ve built a feeling of extended family, a relationship forged over piles of leaves raked on Sunday afternoons, during family walks through the neighborhood, through raucous soccer games on our dead-end street.

And I wonder what will become of that, as new neighbors come and old neighbors go. I realize how much I took for granted . . . how nice it was to have folks next door who never thought it odd when I appeared at their door in my bathrobe at dawn to borrow sugar for my morning coffee.

It’s a sweet relationship, the good neighbor kind. . . . Not friendship, exactly; more functional, less complicated.

Like old married couples, my neighbors and I share a comfort level that has grown in the decade they’ve lived next door.

My kids learned to swim in their backyard pool, learned to hit a softball in their driveway. We built 10 years of holiday rituals: the pumpkins we carved together, the annual frontyard Easter egg hunts, the race to hang our Christmas lights.

And it disappears the day they leave.

On a lark, we went looking at new homes last weekend, as if that might mute our sense of loss.

I watched my daughters’ eyes light up as they took in the splendor of homes too grand for us to afford . . . the Cathedral ceilings, walk-in closets, bedroom fireplaces, crystal chandeliers.

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It would be nice to move, I had to agree. Scrap our aging tract home for what my parents would have called a mansion, a place where each child could have her own bedroom, where I wouldn’t have to share a bathroom with three little girls . . . a home with a pool, an office and “media room,” a kitchen with more than two functioning drawers.

Then, I glanced out at the tiny frontyards so common in new homes these days. Low maintenance and perfect for privacy. But how, I thought, would I meet the neighbors as they rode up into their attached garages, rolled down the doors and disappeared inside?

I thought of the times we’d been thrown together, my neighbors and I . . . those Sunday afternoons doing yardwork, when somebody’d bring out a pitcher of margaritas; those late-night sessions of flashlight tag, when we’d stop hauling trash cans long enough to chase our kids through the yards.

And I glance at the sign that hangs at our neighbors’ home next door, and figure we’ll stay and take our chances, and introduce the newcomers to our neighborhood ways.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].