POLING: Meeting the older folks on the block
We were the young family just moving into our new house.
We were the young folks on the block.
Our oldest son was our only son then and he was in grade school. My wife was in her 20s and pregnant with our second son. I was in my 30s; then, my hair was somewhat full and my middle somewhat thin. Our third son was still a few years away.
We moved into a neighborhood that was friendly but everyone minded their own business. Most of our neighbors were the older folks on the block.
They had been living in the neighborhood for decades. They moved their as young couples, or young families. They raised their children there. Some still had an older child at home, in the last year or two of high school or college. Their adult children had moved out and on with their lives.
They were either retired or working the last years of jobs they had worked for decades. They remembered the neighborhood before the apartment buildings became part of the subdivision.
When we moved here, fields and woods stretched behind the row of houses across the street. A few years into living here, the fields became streets and houses of another subdivision, the woods were cleared and became a gated apartment complex, a series of businesses and more.
As the years passed so did some of our neighbors. A few moved, a few remain but others have passed away.
In recent months, many neighbors have departed, leaving many houses empty. The neighborhood has never been so busy. While the neighbors may have kept to themselves, with their passing and departures, workers removed things, renovated things and revamped things. People sold things. People came looking at houses. And new neighbors have begun moving in.
And now, my wife and I are in our 50s, with me pushing 60, my hair is thin and my middle is too full, decades into careers. The oldest son has been out of the house for more than a decade, 30 years old, with a family of his own. The second son in his 20s and on his own. The youngest son preparing to graduate in a month or so, with plans to move on, too.
Like our old neighbors, we try to be friendly without prying into our new neighbors' business. There, if called, but mostly just waves and a few words while getting the mail now and then.
Stunning though, that some how during the past 20 years, somewhere during all those hours of work and all of those family dinners and all of those late-night homework sessions and all of those times of cutting the grass and watching neighbors go and come, some how, some way, that young couple, that young family, that had been us, that had just moved into a new house, became the older folks on the block.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
