Chapter Two

Starting Over Smaller

Someone recently told me about living in a neighborhood for two years and never meeting any of her neighbors. She’d see cars pulling out of garages in the morning and pulling back into garages when they got home at night. She never actually saw the people who drove the cars.

The idea that living in proximity to others provides the literal and figurative grounds for community—well, it can be true, but all evidence suggests that proximity isn’t enough. There has to be some practice or culture in common. Even then, people who you think would show up don’t, and people who once showed up disappear, never to be heard from again.

I attend a small but vibrant church downtown where community feels thick, but people disappear all the same. If you ask around you might learn there was a falling out or an illness or a new job in a different town or even a loss of faith. Whatever the reason, these people were free to leave, had reason to leave, and it was easy to leave. All they had to do was stop showing up.

Most of us have opted out from one group or another, perhaps multiple groups, for all sorts of reasons. I’ve done it, and what I’ve learned is that most of the time after you’re gone, no one tracks you down. It might be months before anyone even realizes you’re missing, maybe because we’ve gotten used to people just sort of … fading away.

I suspect the reason that most people opt out of neighborhood communities is that they feel overwhelmed by work and kids and the news of the day, and it’s easier to pull into the garage and go straight inside the house, where there’s wine in the fridge and evermore bingeable series on TV. The idea of coming home from work and heading back out of the house to a neighborhood potluck or a church gathering or a volunteer shift, well, it’s just exhausting.

The fact is, things have been quiet on Spencer Street since last summer. We’ve had a gathering here and there, and Amy and Anthony had their annual New Year’s Brunch. But a lot of those heady dreams that gave birth to our street-wide collective have faded. The compost bin that was going to feed our shared garden spaces now resides behind my garage; the shared gardens never materialized. The front yard grow-bags we were tending last summer now sit empty. The monthly meet-ups have waned.

The reasons are exactly what you would expect. Some of us have new babies, some of us have new grandbabies, and some of our kids have reached that stage of life (upper elementary and middle school) where they’re in constant need of transportation—to school, to practice, to the orthodontist. Some of us are feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s happening in 2026 and/or are putting our energy into community organizing beyond our neighborhood.

Personally, I’ve had several big work projects over the last nine months which have kept me quiet here and elsewhere. Given that I somehow became the de facto leader of the Spencer Street Collective, if I’m not organizing gatherings and projects, they mostly don’t happen. We are a people pressed for time. We have many very real family obligations. Our commitment to each other is a bit fragile in the scheme of things.

I think perhaps the larger issue is in this very moment no pressing crisis looms before us.¹We don’t know what the next six months will bring. Without a specific problem to rally around, it’s hard to feel any kind of urgency to prepare for what might loom ahead. It’s harder to feel like we need each other.

But there’s still a willingness to help each other out, and that’s where the Spencer Street group text chat comes in. Dogs still get loose, sourdough starters still die, information about holiday week trash pickup is still needed. Of the 18 households on our street, 14 of them are on the chat. And while a street-wide text message chain might not seem like much, it’s far from nothing. If things go south for whatever reason, it could be everything.

We started off with a big dream, but for now I’m keeping my eye on the small things. Just yesterday, a big storm blew through and the power went out. Within moments, the group chat came alive. Was everyone’s power out? Had anyone put in a call to the power company? The World Cup final was about to start—anybody interested in heading over to the viewing party at Lakewood Social?

This wouldn’t have happened before we started our so-called collective. So maybe we haven’t turned our front yards into farms yet, but Nilesh and Amy have organized a popsicle party for the little ones (and the big ones, too!) tomorrow afternoon. Who knows? Maybe this is the beginning of Chapter Two of the Folk School. Maybe with this small practice of staying in touch when the power goes out or the dog goes astray, we’re keeping faith with one another. Maybe that’s all we need to keep going.

1. Actually, I think a multitude of pressing crises loom before us, but they’re not quite close enough to demand immediate community action.