Neighborhood Watch

This is my neighborhood. People value their privacy here. They are observant – even our UPS driver notices every time one training horse leaves and a new one comes in – but they aren’t nosy. You’ll barely see the folks who live here unless you’re looking for them.

In fact, if you aren’t looking, you’ll miss everything worth seeing.

Once you make this your home, the world opens up. There is some unwritten code here, a prerequisite for acceptance, that you have to love this place – the land, the seasons, the bugs, the long stretches of rain, the unpredictable snows. You have to respect its steep slopes that overturn cars and tractors, its healthy bear population, its wild boar, and its dense forests that absorb sunlight. You have to savor and guard the hidden waterfalls, the black-eyed Susans and wild geraniums, the dwindling hemlocks, the bees and hummingbirds, the views that take your breath away, and the air that smells of grass hay and sunshine. If you understand it like this, you get folded into the land, the neighborhood, and the people. A place that seems so out of the way and quiet comes blazingly alive.

The landscape is wild and unmanageable, for the most part. It won’t tolerate boundaries. The summers are so lush that the roads get swallowed up by the vegetation. The edges of everything – pastures, fence-lines, streams, ponds, and paths are blurred by the grasses, ferns, and wildflowers that grow up and over them.

I’ve run almost every path in this neighborhood a hundred times. I’ve hiked the old trails and fought through the underbrush to made new ones. I’ve strolled down the roads with my dad, toting Cosmo in his carrier, almost every afternoon for the last year. And at this point, I have to practice seeing. The concerns that weigh so heavily on my heart and mind turn my eyes inward, and I get stuck there. The only remedy is to look outside.

My world seems to change by the minute, but this place is old, and it is stable. It changes with the years and the seasons, but it remains fundamentally the same. Houses fall apart and get repaired, they change color and size; some of the roads get paved and then the pavement breaks up. Fields get mowed and grow back; fences get built, and then they fall. And I watch all of it.

This place is stronger than people and circumstances. It has a fundamental identity that it always returns to. In this little neighborhood, I sometimes think I can glimpse the entire universe.

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Romans 1:20