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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 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
Kate Alderwick 