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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
I was sitting in a waiting room while my daughter was in surgery, passing the time on my phone, when my mum sent me a message. She asked if my husband was there with me. He wasn’t. Then she said, “You shouldn’t be there alone.”
I remember chuckling to myself and asking her why not. She said I should have support, and I understood what she meant. For many people, waiting rooms are the sort of place where you want someone beside you, someone to talk to while the time passes. But for me, being there alone didn’t feel wrong at all. It felt completely normal.
What I thought, reading her message, was something I have thought many times before. Not unkindly, just honestly. Mum. You have known me my whole life. Why do you still not know this about me?
My grandmother had the same reaction when she found out. She rang and asked if I was all right, and I could hear the concern in her voice, genuine and sweet. She has never liked being alone in her own house, and I understood that she was speaking from that place. It was tender, really. I wanted to reach through the phone and reassure her that I was perfectly fine, that I was quite enjoying the quiet if anything.
This is not a new quality. It has been part of me for as long as I can remember.
When my father passed away, I was nine. I didn’t cry in front of anyone, not because I was holding something back, but because I genuinely didn’t feel the need to. Later, on my own, I cried quietly, and that felt far more natural than doing it in front of other people would have. Years later, when my stepfather died, my mum collapsed when she got the call. Someone had to stay steady, and I did. Not because I chose to take on that role, but because that is simply how I respond. I carried on through the flight, through the family gatherings, and through the funeral without falling apart. Not because I felt nothing. Because I don’t experience things the way most people seem to.
When my husband has been away for stretches, my grandmother would always ask if I wanted to come and stay with her so I wasn’t alone. Every time, I would thank her and tell her I was fine. Every time, I meant it. My mum never questioned it in the same way, perhaps because she understood from her own experience that a woman can manage perfectly well on her own when she needs to. But my grandmother couldn’t quite accept it, and I never once held that against her. She asked because she would have hated it. I stayed home because I didn’t.
Over time, I’ve noticed the way people respond to this quality in me. There is often a look, a slight pause, as if they are trying to work out whether I am holding something back or simply not feeling what I am supposed to feel. It isn’t usually said directly. It is just there. As if I am a bit odd.
But there is nothing missing. I am not covering anything up, and I am not trying to appear unaffected. This is simply how I am. I process things quietly and then I move forward.
Sitting in that waiting room, watching people come and go, I didn’t feel anxious or unsettled. I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence. I didn’t feel that I should have someone beside me simply because that is what people expect in that sort of moment.
I was exactly where I needed to be.
For some people, being alone like that would feel overwhelming. For me, it feels like space. Space to think, space to sit quietly, space to let things settle without noise or interruption. That has always been enough for me.
So when someone says I shouldn’t be alone, I understand what they mean. They are speaking from what would feel right to them.
But that isn’t how it feels to me. And after all this time, I have stopped being surprised that people find that surprising.
— Kate
I have been content on my own for as long as I can remember.
My grandmother likes to tell a story about me as a toddler. I was in one of those old wooden playpens, happily occupied. If I wanted out, I would remove a slat, climb out, have a look about while my mother was napping, and then climb back in.
Not because I was trapped.
Because I was content.
My mother says I didn’t cry much. I didn’t fuss. I wasn’t dramatic. I was observant. Quiet. Self-contained. She says this as though she is still slightly puzzled by it, even now.
For most of my life, I never thought much about it. I did not feel misunderstood or wrong. I simply assumed everyone processed the world internally the way I did. It took some years to realise that was not quite the case, and a few more to understand why some people found that surprising about me.
Friendships were uncomplicated, which was perhaps made easier by the fact that most of my friends were boys, both growing up in England and after we moved to the States. There was very little emotional analysis, very little drama. We talked, we laughed, we moved on. When something hurt, I thought about it privately and then got on with things. It wasn’t suppression. It was regulation. And it suited me perfectly well.
As I grew older, I began to notice how differently some people move through the world. Some need to speak their thoughts aloud to make sense of them. Some need regular reassurance. Some need visible affection and affirmation in quantities that would exhaust me simply to think about. I do not say that unkindly. People are wired differently. I have simply always been wired rather quietly.
I have always needed very little of any of that.
That independence has served me well. It has made me capable and resilient. It has allowed me to stand on my own two feet without placing much demand on anyone else. I am not a worrier. I do not spiral. I am rarely overwhelmed, and on the occasions when something does land heavily, I process it quietly and move forward without much fuss.
But I sometimes wonder what it costs, being the steady one. People assume you are fine because you present as fine. They assume nothing hurts because you do not make it visible. They assume you prefer to handle things alone because you always seem to manage it.
And honestly, they are usually right.
Being reserved does not mean being empty. It simply means the waters run deep and still, rather than loud and visible.
People rely on me, and I don’t particularly mind that, up to a point. There is something straightforward about being trusted to hold things together. But steadiness, I have noticed, has a way of becoming an expectation rather than a gift, and I am not infinitely patient with that distinction being lost on people.
The girl in the playpen did not need rescuing. She was content in her own company, curious about the world on her own terms, and perfectly capable of letting herself out when she chose to.
The woman she became is much the same. She loves the people in her life fully and without reservation. And she knows, quietly and without drama, that whatever comes her way, she would be alright. There is a particular kind of freedom in that knowledge. Not coldness. Not distance. Just the steady, certain understanding that she was built to stand.
— Kate
I have lived in two countries long enough to know that neither one stays the way you left it.
I was fourteen when I came to America. Old enough to remember England clearly — the neighbourhood, the game nights around someone’s kitchen table, the winters when the whole street came outside without anyone having to be asked. Old enough to carry those things with me. Young enough, perhaps, to build something new without too much difficulty.
The hardest part was the school. I worried my marks might slip with the change in curriculum, the different way of teaching things. I worried about walking into a place where everyone already knew each other and finding my footing. As it turned out, a teacher took it upon herself to introduce me to four girls on my first visit. We sat together at lunch throughout school. We talked in the corridors. There was a sleepover once, I think in the final year. They were good enough friends for what I needed, and I did not need much. That has always been true of me.
America shaped my adulthood in the way that only the place where you truly begin can. I married here. Built a life here. Became whoever I actually am here, rather than whoever I might have become had I stayed. It is home in the truest sense of the word, not because I was born here or because it has always felt familiar, but because it is where I chose to plant myself and grow.
England exists for me now mostly as memory. When I go back, I am always quietly startled by how much has changed. New buildings where old ones stood. Roads that didn’t used to be there. The places I loved simply gone, replaced by something I have no feeling for. It makes me sad in a way that is hard to explain, not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it. The sadness of realising that the place you remember never really existed except in a particular moment in time, and that moment has long since passed.
I don’t feel a pull to go back. England is where I am from. America is where I am. Those are different things and I have made my peace with that distinction.
Though I will say this. I still say England when someone asks where I am from. Not America, not both, not it’s complicated. England. Because that is the honest answer, and because some things stay with you regardless of how many years and how many miles sit between you and them.
My accent has never left. People mention it still, after all this time. I don’t mind. It is the most visible reminder of something I carry quietly and don’t often talk about. That I grew up somewhere else. That I remember a different way of things. That I belong, in some sense, to both places and fully to neither.
And that, I have found, is not such a bad thing to be.
— Kate
There are things I think that I will never say out loud.
Not because they are shameful, or dangerous, or particularly radical. Simply because I am not built that way. I process things privately, turn them over quietly, and then move on without much fuss. That has always been true of me.
But thoughts have a way of accumulating. And somewhere along the way I realised I needed somewhere to put them.
So I write.
I am not entirely sure what this will become. I have a feeling it will cover more ground than I can currently anticipate. Faith, because it is central to my life even when it is complicated. Marriage, because twenty years of anything teaches you things worth saying. Motherhood, because I have always experienced it differently from the way most people seem to and I have spent too long staying quiet about that. The small and specific details of a life that looks ordinary from the outside and feels, from the inside, like something worth examining.
I grew up in England and have lived in America long enough that I belong to both and fully to neither. I notice things. I observe quietly. I form opinions I rarely share in conversation because it has never felt worth the effort of explaining them to people who weren’t asking.
Here, perhaps, is different.
I am not writing to be understood by everyone. I am writing because there are things I have thought for years that I suspect other people have also thought, quietly, without saying. And if one person reads something here and thinks, I have never admitted that, but yes, then that seems worth doing.
This is not a grand project. It is simply a place where the thoughts that would otherwise crowd can go instead.
And perhaps, if I am honest, the quiet hope that it might one day become something more.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 