Ice Cream Social

For a while, we weren’t sure anyone would come to the neighborhood ice cream “meet and greet.” We’d invited a few of the closest neighbors along our road, bought 15 quarts of ice cream, picked strawberries, and cleaned the house.

So we sat on our front porch and looked at our creek side garden that I had only begun to weed and hoe earlier in the day, and waited.

At 7:15, with only fifteen minutes left in the invitation times window, we were getting excited about having all that ice cream and a quiet evening to ourselves when in our driveway drove neighbors J and S’s car.

During our visit, another couple came and went, but J and S seemed very glad for neighborly interaction. They’ve lived here for two decades and even went to the next-door church for 10 years, with nary an invite to anything personal. It’s not that they–or the locals–aren’t nice people. “They’re all very friendly, and they’d give the shirt off their back for you,” they said. “But you can’t break in.”

“And they’re all related,” they said. “So you have to be careful about who you talk about.”

They told us lots about the people around us, including this about our western neighbor who used to own our house and theirs and to whose spring we have rights (which we are considering exercising, against her will):

They bought their farm from a bank; the previous purchaser had gone bankrupt. The farm was where she had raised her family; she had sold it to the now-bankrupt purchaser.

When our neighbors were scoping things out while their purchase of the place from the bank who had received it back from the bankrupt purchaser was underway, our western landowner showed up offering to sell them the curtains in the house ($150 a set) and a few other things around the place. They didn’t pay her, of course, but said she could have the curtains, which are still bagged in their attic (it’s been 21 years). 

For a while, too, after they moved in, she would stop by twice a week to get drinking (well) water; she said she could only drink that water (“It’s the best water anywhere,” she told them). The man across the street, noticing that she was coming by frequently, inquired, and said, “What? She never drank that water when she lived there. I’ll take care of that.” Soon she stopped coming by, and they haven’t seen her since.

(These were reassuring stories to hear, in that it was good to know that our frustrations with her denial of reality, persistent infallibility, and confident ownership of the community aren’t our fault.)

So we ate ice cream and strawberries and drank the lemon-mint tea M had made and had a neighborly chat until 10:30.