The People in My Neighborhood

Sometimes I think about moving to Iowa.  Well, not Iowa specifically,  just to someplace completely different from New York, where we will have enough space and cereal won't cost five dollars a box.

My husband reminds me that I won't know anyone there, but in the moments when I want to escape, I don't care.  It's not as though I see most of my New York friends and family very often anyway.  Either I'm working too hard to have time or they're working too hard to have time.  And there's always email, right?

This morning, I realized moving to Iowa might not actually be all that easy.  It wasn't because my children said they couldn't possibly leave their schools.  It wasn't because I suddenly loved the trains or because today my friends and I were all suddenly able to see each other. What I realized today was that, though I may not have a lot of friends I see daily, I have an enormous number of neighbors I would really miss seeing.

There's the teacher who helped my son learn how to take a standardized test, and the writer on our floor who gives me periodic updates about the state of magazine publishing.  There's the French lady down the hall who's always willing to feed our fish (and says she sings to them while they eat) and the just bat-mitzvahed girl we've know since she was a baby. The super-polite kids who were little when we moved in and are now in college, and the architects whose three year old daughter's face makes me smile every morning.

Would I ever have lunch or dinner with any of these people? Probably not.  But in the ups and downs of life (and there have been a lot of those this year), they give me a home base, a frame of reference, a normalcy I can fall back on when everything else is chaos.

I am sure I would find very nice neighbors in Iowa, or Ithaca, or wherever I'd go.  And, things being what they are, there may come a day when we do move.  But for now, I'll happily just stay here and enjoy the people in my neighborhood.