The next-door neighbour strolled towards us, across his front lawn, up to our chain-link fence, holding what everybody once called a HiLo bag, and his shovel. “Don’t look at what I’m doing,” he apologised when I followed his eyes, which had met mine and drawn them down to a spot he’d missed. I didn’t need to see. A sharp alert from other senses had already completed the picture: he was cleaning up after his dogs.
It’s the way conversations between neighbours across fences are supposed to happen. You’re as obliged to have them as you are to multi-task while doing so, to weave an incidental character into their substance and their length, your garden hose dripping, your grocery bags in hand, your baby on your hip.
He looked forward, and he said it quietly, over the ixora hedge-bush, through the mesh of metal, said it hauntingly: “We’ve sold the house.”
“The National Trust acquired it?” I wanted to ask.
Theirs is one of the rare properties, on what 50 years later we still call the “new” side of Diamond Vale in Diego Martin, that have remained in the original, historic design. Without “burglar-proofing” over the grooved-glass louvre panes on the windows of the three bedrooms along the right side, through which I can still glimpse the perforated board doors of the built-in cupboards.
I looked over the shoulder of where he’d stood, took account of the empty spaces that were suddenly evident behind the occasionally mismatched louvre panes, of the quiet of the missing dogs. Took account of life a half-century ago when my mother’s separation was followed by her mother’s death. And our single-parent family moved—as did my neighbour, his two parents and two sisters—to the Vale.
Diamond Vale shaped me irrevocably. Its thousands of uniformed houses along designed roads laid down over the valley’s abandoned cocoa, citrus and coffee plantations the birds still do not respect are gone.
Its civil servant families. With $15,000 mortgages. The sun rising behind the green eastern hills each morning. The architectural bravery of the new church erected on Diamond Boulevard after an earthquake split open the old one on the main road. The swimming pool and tennis courts that followed; the co-operative supermarket, anchor for what never took off as a shopping centre. The infamous parties of my adolescence.
The original living-room front-window of the house next door is gone—the dysfunctional one with large panes in two panels that you wound to open outward and gaze out onto the world. The one we’d peep out of less than six months after the move, toward the fires and gunfire in the hills on the other side of the Teteron mutiny.
My neighbour’s four words made me take account of the last 50 years of my life, the four generations who’ve lived next door, the six deaths on the block in the last few years.
Nostalgia is how old people and weak leaders cope with our impotence. We romantically misremember a simpler past, with regret or blame. This July, Barbara Burke recollected the “glory days” of her youth, “where you could walk in Port-of-Spain all hours of the night…sleep with the windows open.” And, Carol Ramjohn reminded, the Shouter Baptist faith was still outlawed.
I looked backwards this past week, neither in mourning nor in fantasy. I looked searching for solutions. Those were hardly simple times; they were times of profound change and challenge. Neighbours’ bonds were fraught; we stopped talking to ours more than once. But somewhere in those obligatorily multi-tasking conversations where you stayed connected across the fence, across difference, I found something useful, hope
