Hey First name / friend,
Every morning, for six years, Farmer Bob drove past the kitchen window. Sometimes he beeped the horn of his red tractor. Usually it was a little wave, tossed through the window as he peered past the steering wheel to look at the house. He was looking for a row of stairstep heads, the tiny hands waving back.
We moved into our farmhouse in 2019 and met Bob within a few weeks of moving in. He pulled into the driveway to tell us a few things about the property. “I built the addition on this house in my teens,” he said gruffly.. “They fit six kids in here.” At the time we only had two, but Bob would meet our son (while on the tractor) when he was born the following September. And five years after that, in September 2025, he would meet our youngest child. This time he wasn’t on the tractor. He was on oxygen.
We knew Bob wasn’t well. He was diagnosed with cancer a little before Vera’s birth, and his health was struggling before then. But his death came as a shock. He died on my birthday while we were driving home from a two-week road trip. We weren’t here.
Our relationship with Bob was largely based on proximity. Our property is hedged on three sides by his land. His bulls graze behind our garden, his cows spend the winter in our field, and every spring we watched him usher the yearling calves to the upper pasture, bellowing as they went. Bob was there morning and night, feeding cows, moving round bales, spreading manure, tilling land, seeding, cutting, baling, stacking, driving, — and waving. He teased me about my goats, the size of our pigs, my attempt at a garden and the quality of our soil. But he was also the one who quietly left buckets of cow manure to remedy said soil. The one who plowed our driveway when snow fell to three feet overnight. The one who discovered our goat giving birth in the early morning, when the dew was still cold. The one who called to tell us our other neighbor was keeping bad company, because he was worried about the kids biking past that house.
Bob was dying, and now he’s gone. And your neighbors are dying, too. Do you know their names?
Josh and I had an absolutely terrible neighbor in our first apartment complex. She lived a floor below us and her parking spot was right by our stairs. Everyone had assigned parking spaces but our guests didn’t always know this; inevitably, someone would park in her spot. Manners were not her forte and courtesy, unheard of — so rather than ask our guests to move, she’d sit behind their car and lay on the horn. This could go on for upward of twenty minutes — whatever it took to get the car moved.
Every Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving I made gifts for our neighbors. She left them to rot — literally rot — on her porch. She growled at anyone who came near her, human and animal alike.
She’s probably dead now (based on her age thirteen years ago) and I don’t regret the mini loaves that decomposed on her welcome mat. I remember wrapping them in red cellophane thinking: This is a waste of time. Now I’m not so sure it was. She was dying, like all neighbors are, and I only had so much time.
