Following a tenuous thread

Goings-ons in the neighborhood group chat

We are back and settled down in Dublin after a busy month of travel: first Oklahoma to see my family, then New York for a dear friend’s wedding (more on that soon). I’m so happy to have the flexibility and resources to travel for the people I love, and I am also so, so tired after being jet lagged for what feels like a month straight. Now that the time has changed and we’re living in a season of eternal darkness, it feels like an especially good moment to hunker down and plant roots. I’ve been so busy, and now I’d like to be less busy. I bought a puzzle from the Brooklyn Museum gift shop and fantasized about the moment that I’m in right now, when I could slow down, work on that puzzle with a glass of wine, put on some fuzzy socks and lay around on the couch. It’s funny to look forward to such specific moments and then arrive at them and realize, wait, I’m still the same grumpy person with all of my little frets and issues. And yet I’m so grateful anyway. 

Puzzle, wine and World Cup

Another thing I feel grateful for is that I think I’m making headway towards having a social life here. In some ways, this feels bittersweet - being back in New York reminded me viscerally of how hard it is to feel split between two places. Making friends in Dublin doesn’t negate the friends that I already have, but it does feel sort of like a betrayal in an illogical way. I want to hold tight to everyone I already love, and I also need to make space for new people, new community. It is hard to feel dislocated in that way, to feel that many of the people who are most important to me are so scattered and I am here, in this random new place, even further away from them.

The biggest catalyst has been that I was added to a neighborhood group chat. My next-door neighbor mentioned it to me on Halloween when she and her son came by trick-or-treating, and I gave her my number and asked if she could add me. The next day, I was in, suddenly privy to a wealth of mundane information: discussions over a camper van left parked in the street, leaf clean-up drama (for the record: I think sweeping leaves into plastic bags that will never, ever biodegrade is evil, but that is not a popular opinion in the group chat), many requests for daycare recommendations, and discussion of an apparently long-running issue with rats in the sewage drains. Just reading along made me feel warm and fuzzy at first, especially coming as I had from a huge building in Brooklyn where I’d moved in at the height of COVID and knew maybe two neighbors in total. 

I didn’t start to contribute to the group chat until some unfortunate circumstances forced my hand. Peter found a beloved neighborhood cat named Oreo in our back garden, critically injured. We needed to alert his real owners that we were taking him to the vet, but I wasn’t sure who they were, so I sent a text. I got back not only that information, but an outpouring of well-wishes for the sweet little cat, who as it turns out was a dear friend to many of us. We later learned from the vet that Oreo had likely been hit by a car, and he was so extensively injured that he didn’t make it. It was awful. I felt so silly crying over a cat that wasn’t technically ours, but he was our friend, and that was real. I had to break that news to the neighborhood group chat, reluctantly, since I know knew how much he had mattered not just to Peter and I but to an entire community of people. 

I was dreading giving everyone the update, but when I did, it felt so good to hear that others were just as sad as we were. People thanked us for taking care of him, and one neighbor even dropped us off some chocolates through our letter box. I wondered how she’d known which house was ours, assuming she must have known Peter - after all, he’s lived in this house for years, so maybe his name was familiar to her. Then I looked at her WhatsApp picture and realized I knew her: I’d chatted with her a few times while out walking Rigby. She was actually my neighborhood friend - a thing I hadn’t even realized I could have, until that moment. I’m horrible at names, but now I know her name is Dee, and I can place where on the block she lives. I now know that we both love Reese’s, and that she loved Oreo the cat just like we did. It was all unexpectedly sweet in the middle of a random and very sad thing. 

More followed from there: we hosted a huge Thanksgiving get-together (also more on that soon) and I realized we didn’t have enough table space, so I messaged the group chat and found a lovely older neighbor who lent us a card table and some folding chairs. Then my next-door neighbor texted me privately to invite me to tea, because she “loves American accents.” I’m planning to go over next week. I don’t know where all of this will lead, but I do know that there’s something lovely about making these efforts, and how the neighborhood already seems like a smaller world, a much more neighborly ecosystem, than it did before. My life here is not the same as it was in Brooklyn, but in this specific way, it may actually be better. That’s not nothing.

Bye, Oreo. You were a good friend.