Neighbourly

It’s the Merry Month of May! The Two-Four Weekend is just around the corner. The “Warm Weather Invasion” starts soon. When LOML and I first arrived in the County, all I ever wanted to do was go “home” to Toronto. I didn’t feel as if I belonged in the County. I sure as heck didn’t want to call the County my home or even be a tourist here. I wanted to be back in our apartment in the City. After moving to the County I was a bit like the family pet who waited in the front seat of the family Rolls-Can-Hardly hoping for a car ride back to my home town. I missed our neighbourhood, aka the apartment building we lived in. Slowly, I got to know County people. I found myself liking a different kind of connectedness. At first, I didn’t like the questions about who I was and who I was married to and how many children we have and where we lived and what we did for a living. We hardly ever encountered that when we lived in Toronto. Yeah, we had neighbours— in our apartment building. We knew them not so much by their names, but by the things they did as building neighbours. We had nicknames for our Toronto neighbours, the people we never really knew.

When we were in the City, we lived in an apartment building located, on one side, near a fairly large public park. On the other side was an established, residential community. We were close to a Dominion Store and a Knob Hill Farms shop. The TTC stop was about ten minutes walk from the building and the University was literally “up the street”. Occasionally, we saw our “neighbours” in the apartment’s mailroom or in the parking lot. Sometimes we nodded to them at the garbage chute or in the hallway. Most of the building’s tenants were youngish and, it seemed, most of them had jobs to go to. LOML and I may have known a few of them by name. If we didn’t know their name we gave them one. We lived one floor below “Lead Foot and His Wife”. We weren’t sure what they did during the day and early evening, but their activities sounded a lot like rehearsals for a circus tumbling act. We’d heard they rented two apartments and had knocked a wall out so they’d have a bigger place to practice whatever it was they did. The couple down the hall were “Christian’s Parents”. Christian was a three-year-old who often greeted us in the hallway on his way to “the chute” and entertained us with how adept he was at removing his contact lenses. Yep, a three-year-old with contacts. My pet name for Christian was “Pepperoni Boy” because his favourite food to share was pepperoni which, thanks to Christian, was our newborn son’s first “solid food”. In the apartment below us were the College Moaners. We never actually saw them in person and we weren’t really sure if they were college students, but they did make a lot of moaning noise during the night, if you know what I mean. Their apartment was in lowest level of the building, right below ours. They were, in fact, so loud the neighbours in the house next to our building often banged on College Moaners bedroom window with a broom. And then?

And then we moved here. I didn’t think we’d ever have “neighbours” like the neighbours we had in Toronto—and I was absolutely correct. We didn’t. Everyone here seemed to know everyone else and/or was related to them in some way. While it took us a bit of time to find our true County neighbours, we learned how to be neighbours, too. The County had a very different vibe back then. People really did want to know about you, mostly in a good way. We were told, early on, we would never be “County People”. At the time we didn’t understand what that meant or why it was so important. Well, we aren’t “County”, and we don’t expect to ever be “County” but two of our children are “County” people. In our fiftyplus years here we’ve met a lot of really great people. Many of those people are real “characters”. A few we know only by their manner, like “Old Cigar Smoking Guy”. Some of them became like family to us and a great number of them have been the very best neighbours to us. Interestingly, a slick destination marketing scheme didn’t bring us here. But slick destination marketing schemes sometimes make us wonder if we want to stay.

Yep, the Two-Four Weekend has become a test of our fifty-two years of living and loving the County. May is the month we all dig in, put on a big smile and share the County with people who wish they were us.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca