Several inches of snow fell on Thursday. The next morning, while the rest of my family built a fort in the side yard, I hung around the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, washing the previous night’s pans, checking email, baking bread and watching my neighbor out the window.
Sally is an odd bird. She lives two doors down, but from my kitchen window I have a clear view of her back porch. Her house was probably cute at one point. Now the front yard is a forest of dead trees, broken lawn ornaments, plastic chairs, faded silk flowers and cat carriers.
On days when we are out walking and Sally is sweeping the dirt and carpet-covered driveway, we stop and say hello. She saunters over and poses, Marilyn Monroe style, carefully brushing a loose grey wisp from her forehead and says, quite dramatically, “What a beautiful family.” We talk briefly about the weather and she usually tells us to wait a moment while she digs into the back of her PT Cruiser to find some kind of treat for my kids—cream-filled oatmeal cookies or a bag of very old Hershey bars.
Sadly to say, after ten years of living in our home, two doors down from Sally, that’s been about the extent of our interactions. We always take her cookies at Christmas and send a card, but sadly, I’ve never done much more. Sally is so unusual, so hard to figure out, I’ve never known if she’d want me to. Or, at least, that feels like a reasonable excuse.
So, yesterday morning, I watched her from my kitchen window, as I often do, tiptoeing around in the new-fallen snow, removing the umbrellas she had set up over her bushes. I imagine she puts the umbrellas out to keep the snow from falling on the evergreens, or perhaps to protect the miniature flags and magazine pictures she ties to their branches.
After a while, I poked my head out the door to be sure my kids weren’t getting too cold.
“Hey,” my husband called. “Guess who shoveled our front walk?”
Liam chimed in.
“Sally did it,” he said and then added, “That was really nice of her.”
I closed the door and inhaled the warm, yeasty scent of bread baking. I decided to take her a loaf.
I trudged through the snow and pushed open the gate on the two-foot-high chain link fence that runs across the middle of Sally’s driveway, picked my way through rusted folding chairs and many garbage cans that line the path to the backyard. Standing at the backdoor, I paused.
A thick chain and padlock hung on a plastic chair next to the storm door. Her means to assure no one broke in when she was out, I guessed. Big plastic bows and weathered silk roses were tied haphazardly around the little porch. A big pile of circulars, newspapers, rags and other garbage was piled in the corner.
This woman loves to decorate.
I took a breath and knocked. Nothing. I tried again. Her car was in the drive. I knew she was in there. On the fourth try, the peeling wooden door, heavily taped with pictures of the saints, slowly squeaked open.
“Oh,” Sally gasped when she saw it was me. Then she looked at the loaf I was holding and fluttered her eyes and seductively moved one hand to her hip and cocked it. Her clothes were filthy but she had put on fresh lipstick. Always a lady.
“Amy,” she said in her breathy, movie-star voice. “What a precious family. You’re so busy with those beautiful children. I can’t believe it.”
I wanted to say, “Really, Sally, you’re wrong. I do next to nothing for you. I watch you from my window and worry about you, but you are so foreign to me. I glance at your lawn whenever I walk by and wonder, how in the world did you become this, the woman who tends rotten trees, feeds and houses skunks and raccoons and finds faded plastic flowers worthy of planting? I feel like I can’t begin to know how to know you. And this frightens me.”
But I didn’t. Instead, I smiled and handed her the warm bread.
“Well, Amy,” she looked at me as if she had just planned the greatest heist in history and intended to make me her getaway driver.
She discretely pointed to a small drift of snow at the base of her garbage pile. A champagne bottle was sticking out of it.
“Oh, that will go well with the bread,” I ventured.
“Noooo,” she fluttered her lashes at me. “I put that there for the next person who comes to the door.”
I looked at the peeling foil on the top of the bottle and wondered how many years it had been out here.
She motioned to the bottle and I lifted it from the drift. Then Sally gingerly stepped her dirty stocking foot out onto the snowy porch, leaned toward me with her hand cupped around her mouth and whispered, “I have a whole stash of that.”
I thanked her and considered the implication. I think I had just been invited back.
“You’re a doll,” she sing-songed as I walk away.
Not really, I thought. But I’m learning. And suddenly, the most unlikely person is teaching me.
::
As a side note, I have been inspired lately my friend Margot Starbuck’s Monday Minute videos, which are simply short, beautiful lesson in how to love your neighbor. Check out
her blog to watch them. And then check out her book,
Small Things with Great Love: Adventures in Loving Your Neighbor. She’s a fun and sassy writer who has gotten me thinking about all the places Jesus is living in my neighborhood and how often I fail to see him. . . But I'm learning.
