I grew up in a neighbourhood where six families, including ours, used to gather for game nights. Someone’s kitchen table, a collection of mismatched chairs, the adults talking long after the children had run out of things to do. It happened regularly and naturally, without much planning that I was ever aware of. We were simply taken along, and it felt completely ordinary.

In winter, when a proper snow came, one of the older children would take out a quad bike and pack down the road. The sledders appreciated it. The snowploughs almost certainly did not. We had metal rail sleds, the kind you could actually steer, and if you started at the house up the hill and made the first turn correctly, you could carry enough speed to make it down two full blocks, round the second corner, and come to a stop more or less in front of our house. The whole neighbourhood would be outside by then, without anyone having been formally invited.

It simply happened.

Those are the details I remember most clearly now. Not the game nights themselves, but the ease of them. Not the sledding exactly, but the fact that it required no arrangement. Community, in that place and at that time, was something you were carried along by rather than something you had to build.

I live in a small town again now. About three thousand people within the town limits, thirty thousand or so in the whole county. It is quiet. The roads are unhurried. The pace of life is slower than anything you would find in a city.

But it is not quite what I remember.

I know the names of the people directly across from us, and a handful of others in the neighbourhood, mostly through church or my husband’s work. I would not describe any of them as friends. We don’t gather around each other’s kitchen tables. Nobody drops by without warning. The streets are quiet in winter in a different way than they used to be.

And when two cars pass on a quiet road, most drivers keep both hands on the wheel.

Every now and then an older driver still lifts a hand in greeting. My grandfather is one of them. He will be ninety this December, and he has never stopped doing it. A small lift of the fingers from the steering wheel as another car passes, natural and unhurried, the way breathing is natural. About two years ago I was his passenger when a car coming the other way gave that same quiet wave. I asked him if he knew the driver. He didn’t. He just nodded as if that was entirely beside the point, because of course it was. More recently he was my passenger, and I watched him lift his hand from his lap as another car passed, instinctively, without thinking. He doesn’t even need to be behind the wheel. That small gesture, so automatic he probably doesn’t think about it, felt like watching something rare. The sort of thing you don’t fully appreciate until you realise how few people still do it.

I drive a Jeep now, so I wave to other Jeeps. But otherwise both of my hands stay on the wheel. I don’t stop by my neighbours unannounced. I don’t organise game nights. If that sense of easy community were to come back to this street, I would not be the one to create it, and I think I should be honest about that. I miss something from childhood that I was simply carried along by. Now that creating it would require effort, I find I don’t particularly want to make that effort. That is probably worth sitting with.

And yet I notice the older driver who still waves. I notice the absence of children on the street in winter. I notice that I know my neighbours’ names and almost nothing else about them.

Perhaps noticing is its own kind of caring, even when it doesn’t lead anywhere. Or perhaps it is simply what happens when you miss something and aren’t quite ready to admit you’ve let it go.

— Kate