At a recent dinner at my mother’s house on Chappaquiddick, my aunt was complaining about losing neighbors. A summer cottage up the road from our houses was taken down last year, and the house next to it – a year-round home – is slated for removal as well. In these times of full-tilt construction, I thought I was the only one on the Island complaining about my dwindling neighborhood.

Most houses demolished now are replaced by others two or three or ten times the size of what was there before. However, the land belonging to the houses near us will go into permanent conservation, free of buildings forever. What could be better? Well, considering there is only one other year-round house and six seasonal houses on the mile-long dirt road I live on, losing two houses is losing one-third of my winter neighbors and one-fifth of my summer ones. That means, for example, if we get another huge snow like we had a couple of winters ago, the cost of getting the front-end loader to dig us out will be split only two ways instead of three. That is, if the excavation guy’s house hasn’t been removed.

Yes, this is the same person – me – who will be complaining about new houses going up on the few buildable lots beyond my house. I guess I just have a hard time with change. But if those new houses are filled with neighbors, maybe I’ll be happy about it.

I’ve been pondering the idea of a neighbor and whom I consider to count as one: the person next door, or the people on my road, or the people everywhere on my island? The people to whom I’d go to borrow a cup of sugar, or – since I’m trying to be healthy and stay off sugar – broccoli or Brussels sprouts?
My closest neighbor, right next door, has lived there year-round probably for ten years. A long time ago, he borrowed a cup of something, but otherwise I almost never see him except to wave to occasionally or chat with a couple of times a year when we meet out walking. But when my husband accidentally ran over our old dog, who was sleeping under the car, our neighbor heard the yelps and appeared in our yard almost instantly. That’s the kind of neighbor I like: one who’s there for emergencies but otherwise minds his own business. That’s the kind of neighbor I want to be, too.

But sometimes it’s hard not to mind your neighbor’s business. My neighbor goes off to work every weekday at the same time. When I hear his car start up, I have this feeling of all being right and orderly in the world. Last winter, I noticed I hadn’t heard him leave for a day or two. Because I can (and do) look up his driveway every time I pass on my way home, I noticed that the car was there day after day. By the end of the week, I was seriously fretting about him, in a peripheral, neighborly sort of way. He lives alone and doesn’t seem to get many visitors, so if he were sick, maybe even on his deathbed, it was conceivable that no one would even know – except possibly me!

As the week went by, I argued with myself every time I drove by about whether to call him up to see if he needed some miso soup – and to see if he was still alive. Finally, at the end of the week, I heard him outside working on his house. I was so relieved, partly that he was fine and partly that I didn’t have to break our unwritten code of neighborly conduct by calling to check up on him. Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, I have this lingering memory of him having been seriously ill last winter.

In the 1950s, my family would often stop to visit our neighbor Sally Jeffers, who lived with her two daughters in an old farmhouse across a field from the main road. Sally used to sit in an armchair next to her front window when she got very old. Whenever we’d visit, if anyone drove by she would lift the curtain and report on who it was and where they were going or coming from. The Island was smaller then, and she was a cornerstone of the community. The Jefferses used to wash and iron summer people’s laundry. One year when they had to cut back on their workload, Sally told one of their regular customers that they couldn’t take her laundry anymore. The woman said, “It was like being dropped from the Social Register.”

I live on the same dirt road now as my family did when I was a kid. We used to look to see who it was every time we heard a car coming down the road, and like Sally, we usually knew the driver because it was a neighbor. Now lots of people drive by whom we don’t know, but the old habit of looking is still there. Once recently I was talking with my mother at the front door of our family house and a car came up the road. As if by mutual agreement, we both stopped our conversation and turned to see who was passing by. I think it’s basically in people’s nature to be busybodies. Maybe it’s our animal instinct to
keep track of what’s happening in our personal habitat.

Early on a very cold morning last winter when I was going off-Island, I had this thought: I hope no one’s pipes are frozen. Later that day I realized that the “no one” I had in mind were my friends and neighbors on Chappaquiddick. It suddenly seemed odd that I was worried about these people’s pipes but not about all the other people’s pipes. What about the pipes of all the people on Chappy, or on the Vineyard, or anywhere? How many people’s pipes can you care about, though?

Even though people know less about their next-door neighbors, we are all so much more connected to people on the other side of the world through the media, the Internet, and travel. I like the feeling of connectedness, but it’s hard to have so many more people to care and worry about. I don’t know if I’m ready to take on the world as my neighborhood. I can barely keep track of my next-door neighbor.

At dinner my aunt was saying, and I’m not sure she was kidding, that no one consulted her about taking down the two houses on our road. I know how she feels. I think we’d like to have a say in how things go in our neighborhood, but we sure wouldn’t want the people living there to tell us what to do. Maybe it’s just on Chappaquiddick, but I think there’s a certain aloofness required in being a good neighbor. Recently, I saw a business card that might be useful for neighbors to give out to each other. It says: “I don’t want to do anything so don’t ask me.” But then it includes a phone number and address.