My husband and I were out walking the dog yesterday when a neighbor, with whom we’d exchanged waves but not words since moving to the neighborhood, slowed his car, rolled down the window, and asked, “Y’all like crabs?’”
“Hi. Yes.”
He invited us to come round his place — “the one that looks like a little red shack” —at five for crabs; “no pressure,” but we don’t need much arm twisting to eat free crabs fresh from the river. As he’d say later that evening while he and my husband hauled the live box up onto the dock, “there’s something special about river crabs.”
Sitting out on the lawn together before dinner, looking at the water and the ospreys and a few small fishing boats, our neighbor and his girlfriend encouraged us to admire the view: “Isn’t this gorgeous?” “Doesn’t get much better than this.” They were right.
We learned that our neighbor grew up on the lawn where we sat waiting for the crabs to cook. Behind us was his grandfather’s Sears Catalog Home, a kit house you used to be able to mail order and put together yourself, maybe with the help of your neighbors and friends. We pointed across the river toward the creek where my parents live, a county over. Turns out some friends of theirs lived on that creek, too. As we gazed across the river toward the county where I grew up thirty or so years after my neighbor had, he remarked that my county had been a foreign country to him until the bridge was built. It’s now about a three minute drive across the bridge from one county to the other.
Before we went over for dinner yesterday, our neighbor and his girlfriend were a foreign country to my husband and I. Sometimes all it takes to turn the foreign into the familiar is a bridge, an invitation, a curious question. Y’all like crabs?
Yeah, making friends should be easier. I wish I wasn’t so damn curmudgeonly. Sometimes the bridges we need to build are inside ourselves.
So sweet, Stephanie. And so true; all you gotta do is look someone in the eye, say hi, ask a question, and a whole new reality can be manifested.