Meet the Neighbors

When I first came to live in rural Louisiana, it took awhile to adjust my understanding as to who should properly be described as a “neighbor.” We live at the end of a road ten miles from the nearest place you can buy milk, in a part of West Feliciana parish where describing the population density as “sparse” would be a bit like describing winter in Antarctica as “chilly.” For the most part, there’s a fair bit of space that separates us from those that live in the vicinity so when, in the early years, my wife would say “James; come and meet our neighbor Mister So-and-So,” my first impulse was to look wildly around for the house next door that I’d somehow failed to notice. I moved from an environment that was mostly urban, so for me neighbors were the people with whom you shared a fence if you were lucky, or a wall or possibly a bathroom if you were less lucky, and it took me awhile to adjust to the the idea that a neighbor could be someone who lives fourteen miles away by road. But after having lived out here for fifteen years, it’s all started to make sense. We humans are social creatures first, so in the absence of any near neighbors, we’ll just expand the geographic boundaries of what we consider “neighborhood” until it involves enough people to fill up a dinner table, or ensure there’s someone we can borrow a cup of sugar or a ladder from, or call when we get our tractor stuck in the creek.

Read the Rest