Conjunctions

Once in a while you get a particularly powerful reminder that the world is a small place. We are living in one of those moments now. I, my husband and our three cats are temporarily residing in an apartment while work is being done on our house. It is close enough to our place to make daily visits easy, but it is still in a different neighborhood. We expected that there would be little crossover with any portion of the last 25 years of our lives.

We couldn't have been more wrong.

Our landlord and his wife are long term friends with my sister-in-law Pat, and when I saw his road bikes it was clear that I must have bumped into the landlord many times at rides with the local cycling club. He had classic bikes from the same era as my first bike, when I was riding heavily and leading some trips. The tenant below us, a long term friend of the landlord, was married to the woman who was Pat's best friend and her midwife. He came up the other night to show us pictures of the birth of Pat's second child, our nephew, taken moments after the birth. Sadly, the woman who was his wife and Pat's friend died several years later from cancer.

The conjunctions even extend into this apartment. I met the prior tenant, Cindy, at a gathering at the landlord's place. It turns out that several years ago she had worked for the same pet sitting service as me. We chatted for a bit about the families and pets that we both have known.

Animals seem to link this group of people and this neighborhood. Cindy brought a cat in off the street when she lived here, but he won't stay entirely inside. The house she bought is close enough that he regularly returns to this neighborhood. When he is missing into the evening she drives up the alley and calls him. He hops into her car and they both return to their house, or she visits with old neighbors.

The landlord's wife scavenges discarded Christmas trees to be safe havens for small birds from a very territorial Cooper's Hawk. She puts them in their narrow side yard, and when the babies are fledged she has the trees chipped up. Our own Christmas tree apparently passed muster as a bird haven - she is picky - it was gone from the alley before I had the chance to tell her it was there.

One block over, two families share the ownership and care of a small flock of chickens. Chickens are the one farm animal that is legal inside of city limits. One of the families is a regular pet sitting client, and the coop is carefully nestled under a stand of pine trees in the yard of the other family next door. Once in a while I have gone through the gate to check on the chickens when I was out back exercising the dog and I heard a huge ruckus. The wife in the couple next door is the daughter of someone I knew for many years, in fact I first encountered this young woman when she was a child. Now she has two of her own.

This is a long post - I first thought of breaking it into two days. But the connections are all about this place, this neighborhood, and they don't untangle easily.