LOVE THY NEIGHBOR — OVER THE FENCE

My parents lived on a block with four new brick cape houses on quarter acre lots. The kitchens of the two middle houses faced each other, about twelve feet apart, with small double casement windows above the sink.

Every morning, after putting the children on the school bus, my mom Rose and her neighbor Madge washed the dishes in full view of each other. Same for dinner.

When they were done, they would meet outside in moderate weather to chat, except on the weekends when the husbands were home. They didn’t bother to take off their aprons, the uniform of the times. Madge lit a cigarette to celebrate the completion of her morning chores but my mom did not indulge. All sorts of personal business was conducted, subjects to which single-digit me was not privy.

The curtains, those excessively frilly styles in organdy material tacked to the sides of the frame, were never pulled over the windows. Like now—similar to Facebook—daily life was an open book.

Neither had their driver’s licenses because the husbands drove the one family car to work. It was true that they borrowed a cup of sugar or two eggs on occasion to complete a recipe. They couldn’t just jump into the car for a quick trip to the supermarket. The pound cake or apple pie was always shared, hot out of the oven, with a mid-afternoon cup of coffee before the children came home. Then, preparations for dinner began in earnest. Lamb chops with ketchup, mashed potatoes, and Birdseye frozen peas and carrots would do just fine.

That was in the 1950s, before my mom Rose started selling World Book Encyclopedias door to door and before Madge passed away untimely from a chronic heart condition. I’m happy that they enjoyed their supportive friendship close to home in times when options were limited for women.

Their relationship was in the image of actress Gertrude Berg who called over the clothesline into the next apartment building — Yoo Hoo Mrs. Bloom — on her network television show The Goldbergs from 1949 to 1954. I was an avid fan from age five to nine.

I know times have changed, but I witnessed the neighborhood rituals in cramped city apartments on our Dumont TV console, and then in my own backyard in newly suburban New Jersey where the old ways lasted for just a while longer.

Madge and Rose — now that would have been a good title for a sitcom about two neighbors in aprons, the tall one with the red hair a la Lucille Ball hanging laundry on the carousel clothesline, the short one lighting up a smoke as she unlatched the picket fence gate to our yard. I can just imagine them on the day when they decided to defrost their freezers, madly mopping up the water dripping onto the kitchen floor and flowing down the back steps.

That’s a scene that Gertrude Berg and Lucille Ball would have been proud to include in their shows — if they had thought of it!

🏡 🔆          🏡 🔆         🏡 🔆         🏡 🔆        🏡 🔆      🏡 🔆           🏡 🔆

When we moved to our current home in 2001, our new neighbor quickly welcomed us with a huge tray of Eggplant Parmigiana.

Carmela and Tony (not their real names), a brother and sister in their early eighties, never married. They needed someone to nurture and frequently invited us over for the most delicious meals, then sent us home with leftovers to last the week.

Tony, a retired engineer, loved Italian opera videos and made his own red wine. Carmela, a seamstress, had considerable expertise in the traditional domestic arts. She knit colorful afghan blankets for our new granddaughters. My favorite is the elegant combination of deep teal and pale blue-green, art along with craft.

Carmela clearly ruled the roost, an outspoken survivor of years on her own. Tony was a quiet and gentle man. He confided in us about the hardships he endured during the years he spent as a prisoner in World War II. He had been in the king’s guard but was captured during the Fascist regime.

They were able to emigrate to America together after the war and fiercely loved their new country, feeling safe and ready to contribute.

My husband established a prolific garden and brought over vegetables and herbs for Carmela’s use. But we were plagued by woodchucks who invaded the garden under cover of darkness and ruined it often.

One morning, he went out to work in the garden only to find his carefully grown cornstalks massacred by the critters, the cobs pulled off and half-eaten. He bought a Have-a-Heart cage to trap the culprits, with the intention of relocating them to a distant wooded area.

Apparently, the woodchuck trapped in the cage was visible to Carmela from her kitchen window. She called early that Sunday morning and screamed into the phone, accusing us of cruelty to animals, branding us “killers,” that she wanted nothing to do with “people like us,” then slammed down the receiver. I stood there with the phone in my hand, speechless.

Early the next day, a crew appeared to measure the property lines. I knew what was happening—a spite fence would go up—an ugly stockade style that we both had to look at along the three hundred foot boundary between us.

Tony passed away a year later and I sent a condolence card. But Carmela held her grudge and never looked our way to say hello.

Every year, a few more panels blew down in snow or wind storms. The fence company had not properly installed the wood posts in cement tubes; the bottoms rotted in the dirt or were twisted by frost heaves. Carmela sent for them to repair the ongoing damage or replace the sections, keeping the wall intact.

Seven or eight years later, I received another surprise phone call from Carmela—she no longer wanted us to be enemies. I agreed wholeheartedly and of course I accepted her apology.

But by then, my husband was seriously ill. I was his caregiver and simply did not have the energy to renew the neighborly relationship. She may have thought I didn’t care, but the truth is, my life was in shambles. I had no emotional reserves to welcome anything or anyone into my life—or even to explain.

And our garden suffered from neglect. We had to sell the tractor with the rototiller attachment that had turned over the annual supply of compost into the earth. Paul could no longer figure out how to operate the equipment. I remember that unbearably sad day when I wrote up a bill of sale and the buyer drove the Kubota onto his trailer, then hauled it out of our yard.

Last year, I saw Carmela’s obituary in the local newspaper. I mused on both Tony and Carmela, brother and sister immigrants from Italy who lived their American Dream together in a spacious brick ranch house on two acres in Massachusetts after losing everything under Mussolini in the World War.

I’m sad for the losses, and for my aborted friendship with them based upon a silly misunderstanding. But not everything is possible in life and I had to let it go.