Awkward Bombshell Tries to Neighborhood

I am, objectively, the worst. I mean, I didn't spend my childhood being fat and watching 90s movies full of sassy-mouthed brunettes insulting the hot motorcycle guy before he ultimately falls in love with her to not become a sarcastic anti-social bitch myself. Life in the suburbs is a study in contradictions for me. The houses and properties touch each other! but we build fences between them. I don't know what to do with that. Are we supposed to talk through them, as I sometimes do with my neighbor (ala Wilson and Tim from "Home Improvement")? The one time she poked her head around the corner of my fence and made herself visible while saying hello I screamed like I was in a slasher film because it startled the living crap out of me. Yep. Bad enough the shrieking opera singer that lives next door to you has chickens in the yard, an apocalyptic lawn, and lettuce growing in the roses, but if you try to say hello to her she'll scream in your face--and, you know. Opera singer. Good lungs.

I am so sorry I exploded your head with my big fat voice. For reals, you seriously startled me though.

I don't know how to live in the suburbs. Is it a competition? My street is full of mommies that are better than me in everything. They volunteer as room moms, pull wagons full of Girl Scout cookies, coach soccer, do Pilates and Barre and run and train their dogs like boss bitches. My dog looks at me out of the corner of one rolled eye and mind melds with me so he can mentally flip me off. Are there expectations? Pretty sure there are a minimum set of expectations that, like, the hoarders across the street are definitely not meeting, with the shredded tarp half covering the four hundred year old sedan --but my fence hasn't been painted in, like, ever, even after we had it sand blasted five years ago. In preparation to paint.

Every once in a while I get it into my head to make community, and obviously, as a woman with deep roots in both the Catholic church basement potluck casserole tradition (hot noodles with cottage cheese) and the midwestern "Bring a Dish to Pass" picnic summer salad tradition (cold noodles with mayonnaise) I understood. Community starts with food.

I decided I was going to make special little rice krispie treats for all the kids in the neighborhood my children knew for Halloween. I made the rice krispie treats. They were FREAKING. FANTASTIC. The stuff you get in the packages in the vending machines is not a real rice krispie treat with butter and soft marshmallows. Yes, I realize it's not cooking, but it is iconic American mixing. And it's delicious. All of this to say that after I tasted the first bite that I spooned into my buttered casserole dish I immediately started thinking how much the parents were not going to want their kids to have a non-packaged snack for trick or treating. I flashed back on a TV show episode where the mom painstakingly made home-baked treats for all the kids in the neighborhood and one of the parents rings the doorbell to return them. When the mom confusedly says, "But we've been handing them out all night!" the other woman raises an eyebrow derisively at the lawn, littered with the discarded treats the other parents had immediately pitched. I didn't want my rice krispie treats to get thrown away on my lawn when they were this delicious! I should just eat them myself, right?

What? No. I'm not eating CHILDREN'S HALLOWEEN TREATS.That. Would be wrong.  

I stopped myself. Ok. My children could go deliver the little treats to the houses of their friends early on Halloween night. It could be a little neighborhood thing. The kids would do it, obviously, since it would be weird for an adult to just show up at people's houses with creepy little gifts for their children. Totally different from the same children coming to my house and begging for creepy little gifts. I sent my kids off with the little packages. They all came back to the house--everyone was already out trick or treating. "We should eat them ourselves, mommy. Right?" My youngest was always perfectly in tune with my own dark desires, but I staunchly resisted temptation. I was just going to have to give out. The treats.

When the first kid I knew came to the door I gathered my courage and looked for the parents lingering in the back of the crowd. "I..uh...I have a little treat for...you know...the kids that know my kids...if that's ok...he's in Christopher's class at...uh, at school, and I thought it'd be nice, but if you don't want to let him have..." The dad laughed, reached past his kid and took the treat.

"Of course. Thank you! Nice to see you, Sarah, say hi to Chris."

Oh. You know my name.

Am I trying to create community? Or just finally forcing myself to join it?

I kept trying. A friend of my husband's moved in down the street to a house with a lemon tree. He sent over a big sack of lemons he didn't want. I got inspired to use them all to make a big carafe of homemade lemonade and sent it over to him in a pretty glass container, thinking it would start a back and forth where he sent us all his unused lemons and I made huge vats of lemonade to split them between him and us.

No, he just kept my pretty glass container.

I...don't understand why you didn't anticipate what was in my brain though.

Ugh. I don't even like people. 

Ok. I tried one more time. I made candied apples and sent one over to my neighbor with small children. It was in the worst possible taste and literally made of fruit coated in corn syrup and red dye and it was delicious. 

She accepted it. And sent over an apple pie. 

Wait. 

I think that was it. This may be how that was supposed to go. Ok, I'll try a box of cookies to the next door neighbor whose head I exploded with my "American Horror Story: Garden" screams. She sent back a banana bread covered in delicious toasted walnuts. 

What has happened to me. I know people's names that live on my street and sometimes call them by that when I pass them on the sidewalk, or even more against my nature, I don't quickly look away to avoid making eye contact when I'm backing down the driveway. These are great skills, because now people stop all the time to ask me about my chickens and the garden and find out what we've got growing. I try not to be the worst person and hide behind my fence gate when I see wandering groups of polished professional ladies power walking past my house in their coifs and their Coldwater Creek coordinated ensembles because these glamour pusses are exactly the people I should be selling on the Gospel of Dirt. I mean...I try, but sometimes I pretend to myself that I haven't watered the alpine strawberries that happen to be behind the fence gate, and it usually takes about the same amount of time as the Coifs take to pass my house. 

Today I was backing out of my driveway, on no particular hurry, and a woman came running up to the car, waving her hands to get my attention. Dammit, I thought. Did I run over a cat just now? Dammit! She signaled to me to roll my window down, gesturing wildly. God. Do you want to sell me something? Because I already have all my magazine subscriptions, plus the ones I paid for and never received, and I'm not really down with buying meat off the back of the refrigerated truck. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and rolled down my window.

"I'm sorry," she said cheerfully. "I see you're leaving. Could I take my granddaughter onto your lawn to look at your chickens?" 

A tiny girl with black curls, maybe three years old, popped out from behind her grandmother's legs, bouncing a little as she held onto her grandmother's hand and looked up at me excitedly. 

"Sure," I heard myself say. "Do you want to hold one?" I parked and turned the car off. Delighted, the beaming little girl ran ahead of us to the chicken coop and put both hands up to the chicken wire, peering in at the hens. I kicked off my heels, opened the coop and took out the friendliest and most personable hen, my redhead Maisie. "Would you like to touch her first?" I showed the little miss how to gently stroke the front of Maisie's chest instead of the top of her head, the way she liked it, and then held Maisie's wings at her sides and deposited her into the little girl's lap. She giggled and then her mouth formed a huge round "O" and then she giggled again, still gently stroking Maisie's chest feathers with one tiny finger. 

"Thank you so much for stopping and visiting with us," her grandmother gushed, and held out her hand to me. "It's so, so nice to meet you. I'm Deborah." 

Hi. I'm Sarah. Won't you be my neighbor?

No, I know. I hated how that sounded and I wish I hadn't said it.