Sometimes when you’re looking for a refuge, what you really need is a community.
My new house was already worrying me, and I hadn’t even moved in. The problem wasn’t all the work it needed, though the wood floors hadn’t been properly cleaned in decades and the kitchen appliances were relics of the 1970s.
Renovations would be costly, sure. But the trickier issue, by my estimate, would be relations with the neighbors. I had reason to fear there were some overly friendly people in the mix, which made me nervous some would be overly talkative, too.
“With this place, you wouldn’t just get a home, you’d get a neighborhood,” the seller’s agent told me at the open house.
She said this as if it were a selling point.
Apparently, the entire street held a pizza party every month, a 40-year tradition started by a few 70-somethings who’d lived on the block since they were raising kids. The rules were simple: Serve nothing fancier than pies from the place by the highway, and chocolate chip cookies or brownies for dessert. The goal was to keep things inexpensive, so everyone would participate.
My boyfriend practically turned cartwheels when he heard this. He’s a sociologist, which means he likes community so much that he studies it for a living. We’d barely learned my bid on the house had been accepted when he said, “We get the pizza parties, too!”
I groaned: “We’re not going.”
“Oh, come on. We have to,” he said. “This kind of thing doesn’t exist anymore.”