I took a long trip with my
family this summer, six weeks away from home. Well before we left,
during the school year, we found some ideal house sitters. A young
couple my wife knew who needed a place during that same time and
who were eager to trade some yard work and house upkeep. One of
those rare win-win situations, a relief to all.
Only,
when the time rolled around, things had changed. In the last week,
while our trip preparations were reaching a frantic pitch, we made
contact to firm up our details. Turned out that the couple had to
hold on to their apartment and no longer needed our house. More
than that, they had taken jobs that required them to commute from
town. We were a little alarmed at the news, but despite the changed
situation, the house sitters said they remained committed to taking
care of things.
“No, no,” they said, “we’re still on it.
We’ll take care of the house.”
By then it was too late to
arrange anything else in any case, so we cleaned the place, left
them a long note on the kitchen table and headed off.
It
didn’t quite work out the way everyone had hoped. Our sitters’
situation had changed so that it was untenable for them to live
there, and the chores that seemed a great trade when we first
talked were now an extra burden. The neighbors said they saw them
once or twice during the first week or so, then never again.
The strange thing, though, once we were back, was that
things seemed taken care of despite the change in our arrangements.
The mail the house sitters were supposed to have collected was
sitting in the cardboard box marked MAIL. The newspaper we’d kept
coming had been picked up. The gardens had been watered.
Everything, in fact, looked pretty good, even though it was clear
that nobody had used the house.
The next morning I ran
into the neighbor across the street. “Yeah,” he said, “we noticed
that it didn’t seem like anyone was staying there, so we started
going over to get the mail and the paper. We watered the front a
couple of times, too. Not a big deal. Seemed like a few people were
keeping an eye on things.”
Later on a friend stopped by.
She rode her bike past our house all summer on her way to work. “I
noticed that the garden looked pretty dry. I didn’t want to impose
or anything, but it didn’t seem like anyone was watering, so I
started doing it a couple of times a week.”
One of the
women in the rental across the alley came over to welcome us home.
“Your house was looking pretty empty,” she said, “so we parked one
of our cars in the driveway at night, just to make it look lived
in.”
Every time we ran into someone we knew, it seemed
like they had been keeping tabs on things, coming by and looking
in. If something needed to be done, it got done. If a door had been
left open, it got closed. When plants looked dry, they got watered.
None of this had been set up. Sure, our friends all knew
about our trip, but that was it. We might have mentioned the
sitters to a few people, but nobody was supposed to check up. It
just happened. Folks noticed things, took care of stuff. No one
person took on the entire burden, but between the casual attention
of our friends and neighbors, the essentials were tended to and our
house escaped that abandoned look that creates a target for
whatever bad might come along looking for opportunity.
Now, as I was growing up, my family moved a lot. Consequently, for
a good part of my life the concept of community was just that, a
concept. Only as an adult, living in the same town for 23 years,
has the idea of community assumed a kind of tangibility. A reality
made up of knowing the clerks at the post office, chatting with
local politicians on street corners, serving on boards, weaving
together the history of a neighborhood — and becoming part of
that history.
But I’d never experienced firsthand a
demonstration of what community can mean until I went away for the
summer and things didn’t go according to plan. Maybe it’s time to
have a little backyard appreciation party for our small and
wonderful volunteer band of house sitters.
Alan
Kesselheim is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He lives and writes
in Bozeman, Montana.
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