This Halloween, my daughters will don their wigs and wands and, holding out their plastic pumpkins, knock on the doors of houses where friends used to live.
The migration happened slowly at first. Our “best friend couple” moved home to Louisville for a new job. Seven years gone, their door still flashes the shade of fire-engine red I helped choose. Further down the block, my husband first learned how to julienne an onion. The couple — empty nesters — left five years ago for a bigger garden. The first couple among us to have kids left our Baltimore neighborhood four years ago, when it was time for kindergarten.
Each move brought its own quiet sadness, a shifting of the daily fabric of our tight-knit block. Then last winter, a move that stung even more: The couple we’d doubled down on after the departure of our red-doored Kentucky friends. Impromptu play dates bled into potluck dinners. When the wife’s mother visited from California, my children took to calling her “Grandma Nancy.” At Halloween, those grandparents dressed as Dr. Seuss characters and handed out candy on the front steps.
That family walked into an open house on a lark. The week before, we’d all sat around our dining room table, as they brainstormed plans for a possible addition. They just needed to know we planned to stay for another, say, 30 years. We’d laughed. I proposed a counter offer: In a few years, both families move to bigger houses on a new street.
Either way, I thought we’d have more time. But a month later, they were gone.
Trick-or-treating on our street always looked a bit like a nursery school parade — kids of every size and costume, faces stuffed with pizza, racing after each other, up and down front porches in the crisp fall air. One year, I had to stand halfway up our staircase to capture every child in the photo, all squashed inside our small living room. Recently, my daughter asked who they’d trick-or-treat with: Eight of those little faces in the photo have moved since last Halloween.
In truth, we were supposed to be one of those other couples — here a few years, then gone. We knew next to nothing about our new neighborhood when we found this starter house at the end of the block, its fenced-in yard perfect for our puppy. This was a stopover for graduate school. Little did we know that we’d stumble into a village and put down roots, sharing not only proximity but experiences: walking after dogs, then strollers, then training wheels all down the same sloping, uneven sidewalk.
Those other parents are how I’ve survived these early years of motherhood. They’ve witnessed my lowest moments, watched me stumble and offered an arm. I want to put it on pause — to stay in this moment in time when we villagers slip in and out of each other’s homes as easily as well-worn slippers, shared caregivers to this throng of helmeted children racing down the sidewalk. But here we are: Our puppy is now an old dog. Eleven years in an hourglass that feels as if it’s almost out of sand.
The loss of each neighbor hits me like the loss of family. Yet, unlike my biological family, these people are not required to spend Thanksgiving with me. Or remember my daughter’s birthday. We’ve been bound by geography, not blood. And as the distance between our front doors grows, so too, does the time between potlucks. True friendship, it turns out, must withstand the test of buckling car seats and managing calendars.
Should we leave? The thought fills me with panic, even as I keep the Redfin real estate app on my phone’s home page, scrolling new listings, viewing the possibilities with my realtor mom’s discerning eye.
A few months ago, the bobbing yellow balloons of an open house compelled me to pull over. I asked my daughters if they’d like to explore. They’ve inherited my nosiness, and so the prospect of seeing someone else’s bedrooms sent them racing from the car. We poked around. The realtor offered us a cookie.
I returned to the house two more times, saying nothing to my remaining friends on the block. I mentally arranged our furniture in the house. Standing in the kitchen, I saw what my mother would have seen: a wall torn down, French doors out to the patio.
But I also saw something else: how isolated this place was. Three separate visits to the house and I’d never once glimpsed the family next door. There was no gaggle of kids racing scooters down the sidewalk, no friends lingering outside to chat about the day. Where others might relish the privacy, I wondered, on whose door could I knock if I realized we were out of children’s Tylenol?
So we stayed.
Because the truth is: I’m terrified of leaving my little enclave, with the running text chain of gently used clothes to pass along. I’m afraid of whether I can be a mother without this village, even as the village that I knew dwindles, reconstitutes with new, unfamiliar faces.
A few months ago, that empty-nester friend posted on social media a photo of our street from 1995. The scene shows a postage-stamp lawn arranged with beach chairs, an inflatable pool, a plastic slide. A handful of children toddle as parents hem the frame. Twenty years ago, this was their street, filled with their toddling children, front yard play dates and parental happy hours. And eventually, each family vanished from the block, creating space for my village to enter.
My daughter tells me we should buy our next-door neighbor’s house when she moves. “That way,” she says, “when I’m bigger you can live there and still be next door.” At age 6, she already understands that other people come and go from our street. I don’t mention that we, too, might one day leave this place. I wonder how, years from now, she will remember this house, which photo will encapsulate her time here, which trees will shade the backdrop, and which playmates she’ll struggle to remember because they’ve receded from our daily lives.
Over the summer another mom — a lifeline to me on a daily basis — left. She took with her my daughter’s best friend, leaving, in their place, renters.
And so, the cycle continues. Such is the fate of rowhouse life in a city for those with means enough to move upward and onward. Kids grow up. The house itself seems to shrink. There’s the draw of bigger yards, the rattled nerves about attending public school in the city. It’s a slowly revolving door.
On Halloween we’ll ring doorbells, doors opening to new faces inside those houses that helped raise my children. Perhaps we will get to know them, fold them into our village. A recent arrival asked if the block does anything for Halloween. I had to laugh, then took her email. Reluctantly, because I wonder how long they will be here.
In the meantime, we stay, and wait for the moment when we, too, will likely leave. And being the last to leave is always hard.
Maggie Master, a writer based in Baltimore, is working on her first novel for young adults.