Neighborhood, Finally

Late this afternoon, after a most satisfying day registering voters in Pennsylvania with a friend, I decided to take an exhausted Lily to the greenmarket, as neither she nor I wanted to sit around while Annika napped. As we pushed through the door in the lobby, we saw our friends from the sixth floor--a father and his two boys, boys Lily loves--just outside. The dad and the oldest boy were playing chess; the younger boy was drawing on the sidewalk with thick pieces of colored chalk. Lily looked up at me, longingly, as the dad said, "Can Lily stay here with us while you go to the market?" She actually jumped a foot off the ground in excitement. I told them all that when they were headed inside, if I wasn't back yet, that Lily could be dropped off at our apartment, as Ben was home, working, while Annika slept.

When I came back up the street about an hour later, our friends from the second floor--a mother and her three children, one of whom is a newborn--had joined the crew. The kids were having so much fun they didn't notice my arrival. They had drawn a series of hopscotch boards. They had drawn "safety spots" for tag, which they were playing with such enthusiasm that even the most crotchety passersby smiled. The older two kids corralled the younger ones away from the street if they ventured too close. The bossier kids protested if someone lingered too long in a "safe spot," slowing the game. Periodically, someone would stop mid-run just to hug someone else. Seriously.

The four adults--we had been joined by one's visiting step-mother--stood by the side of the building and chatted, about politics, restaurants, recipes, the stock market, jogging, a little of this and a little of that, as we watched the kids play. At one point the dad said, "I wish we had a camera. I wonder if they'll remember this in thirty years."

They will. I still remember how wistful I felt whenever we would drive away from my cousins' house, watching out the car window as all the kids on the street gathered by somebody's mailbox to play twilight Kick the Can. Even more vividly I remember the times I slept over and was invited to join. I loved every instant of it--the sound of voices calling over lawns as the sky darkened ever so slowly and the fireflies danced in the raspberry bushes--but I was never of it, myself, only a visiting guest.

But Lily has this--these friends who she doesn't see every day, every week, who don't go to her school, aren't exactly the same age as she is or as each other, have their own busy lives during the week. And every once in a while, more than that, actually, but in moments that happen organically--on the sidewalk, on the roof deck, in one of our apartments after a chance meeting in the elevator--there is this vibrant, noisy, joyful, chaotic gathering of these children who know each other homes and families, favorite toys and infant siblings, and no camera is necessary to record the sight or the sound. Feeling completely at home in this scene is a gift I am so glad Lily has been given, not by me but by the circumstances of our lives.

Because we didn't have one, though, a camera, I will record the moment I would like to remember: the five oldest children, ages four to seven, running in a semblance of a line, chasing the youngest one, mine, who stopped then to be caught--the point of every game of chase--head thrown back, hair wild, eyes bright, laughing so hard she was crying.