hey neighbor
The new neighbor lives openly, loudly, her life spilling across the narrow public sphere of the yard between buildings. Branches and brambles provide an equivocal visual screen, but sound passes through unmuffled. Her conversations are eager, enthusiastic, kindly, echoing out the open windows of the barely furnished ground floor apartment next door, which she has not quite finished (or, it would seem, even truly started) moving into. She talks to her computer, she talks to a regular roster of visitors, she talks to her dog, who in response spends much of the early evening barking at ghosts. Her words, and more especially her carrying, bracing tone, convey a sense of her overall, seemingly indiscriminate niceness and human caring (that lovingkindness so out of the ordinary it runs together into one word), which prevents the stream of chatter from becoming truly irritating. It is, however, another reason to long for fall and then winter – and the closing of windows.