Close Quarters - Tre

Sunset on our street.

EE is happy on her own for the first time today, because she discovered the delicious T's cookie bar that I was about to eat as my after-swim snack. She decided that I was eating damp sand out of a sandwich bag and immediately started digging in and crumbling it with her chubby little fists, making her monster voice all the while. It was so cute, how could I stop it? This has been her worst bout of teething since the first two so she's extra pathetic today. (Read: extra spoiled, despite me implementing "time outs".)

Oh, she discovered that it's not sand. Well it's all gross and babyhandled now, so I'm glad one of us is getting to enjoy it.

[In the time it took me to write about Eva being occupied and leaving me free to write, she finished being occupied and I had to stop writing for the day and get out the vacuum. >24 hours later...]

. The other day I realized just how cramped we are here on our little piazza. I think the fact that it took me 7 months to realize this speaks to the fact that I really don't mind. But we're in an end unit. We don't share a walkway with anybody, and our front door doesn't open 3 feet from somebody else's front door. I get cell phone service inside, because I'm not embedded deep in a concrete bunker. Thinking about this takes me back to the Army cribs of my childhood. At West Point we were in an end unit with a fenced side/back yard for our awesome German Shepherd, Chief. But that didn't work out so well for him, as he felt very defensive toward men in uniform. He went to live on a farm in California. (No, literally, that's not a euphemism. He found his real home as my Papa Joe's executive officer.) I vaguely remember my mom often mentioning how small our quarters always were, but that meant nothing to us. We were kids--everything was big! In Panama City we lived in an apartment squeezed between a coffee factory behind and some serious partiers above us. One of the windows in our building had a bullet hole, which my kid brain connected with Just Cause having gone down 2 years before. Of course the bullet hole was from the war. Once we got onto Fort Clayton we were in a duplex, and could actually talk to the kids in the room next door through the wall. (First, Alfredo and Eduardo, then a passel of rough-around-the-edges Mormon boys.) We would play knocking games too. When I moved into a college dorm years later, I got the same kind of feeling but with less camaraderie.

Nathan and I agree that there's a lot to be said for living cheek-by-jowl. It leaves room for the good stuff, like lots of playgrounds and fields where otherwise there could be just one-big-house/yard, one-big-house/yard, blah blah. Plus neither of us is a big fan of yard work. I'm not saying we like the small houses, just the close-togetherness.

There is a certain awkwardness that living close together removes from new friendships. The way you can casually knock on a neighbor's door to say hi or ask a question or say "Please take my child!" is very different from picking up the phone, especially in those uncertain, early days when you're wondering what path the relationship is headed down. Casual acquaintance? Buddy-buddy? Deployment wife? Pretend-you-didn't-see-her? Neighborship is a good start to any of these. (For the record, neighbors, I never pretend-I-didn't-see-you on purpose. Sometimes I'm zoning.)

There are drawbacks, too. The selfish part of me gets annoyed at the kids walking through our yard right alongside our house, as though it's theirs--but what harm are they doing? Someone's refrigerator or broken mirror might end up hanging out in your lawn. Someone's dog might poop in the next yard over even though he's tied up, because the yards are that small (guilty!). The parking is borderline cutthroat for the innermost houses. But overall, it's cozy. It would probably take only a couple of hours for someone to notice if I slip in dog pee and hurt myself and can't move and am calling desperately for help...