By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Dear neighbor, I wonder if you know how much I like walking by your house. Your house on the corner, so low, just one story, beneath enormous leaning trees, with your worn porch furniture and the lumpy bed for the dog to lie on. Your house midway up the street, the arched front windows all filled in with cement for some reason and gridded with spiked iron bars that give the place the air of a medieval cloister. Your house in the elegant neighborhood where you’ve allowed your yard to run riot and dust to darken your impressive old mullioned windows. Your house in the modest neighborhood where you’ve painted your front door orange and bordered the sidewalk with sunflowers. All your houses, neighbor.
Tonight I walked past your house and you waved to me from the porch so vigorously it felt like you were glad to see me again, although we’ve never spoken. I walked past your house and you were washing a bunch of plastic basins in the front yard and one of your kids was running around naked. You were standing on a ladder, nailing something to the porch. Half concealed behind the heat-crisped dogwood, you were having a quiet phone conversation in Spanish. You’d set up a row of lawn chairs, their legs sunken in the grass, and brought a screen and projector outside, and your kids were all excitedly watching a cartoon that lit up the dark street with a green light, while you and the other adults passed to and fro with drinks. You were just coming home, opening your front door, a bearded stranger, and I glimpsed the string bass leaning against your living-room wall. Neighbor, it was awesome to think of you playing that thing in the evenings for the dog that was pushing past you into the house.
Your house always looks so eerie and withdrawn when I come down the hill past your severe dry lawn, where no tree or shrub grows. The two cars are always parked under the shelter, the rooms shrouded in darkness except for the single light in an upstairs window. I’ve got no idea what’s going on in there, whether you’re ill or just resting or thinking, why nobody ever seems to go in or out. But when I see these familiar signs, when I sense your special aura of isolation, I know you’re still there. Year after year I pass the reassuring evidence of your ongoing presence, neighbor. Those rusty bicycle wheels hanging up in your porch—they couldn’t belong to anyone else. Who else would leave the front window clogged with an impenetrable curtain of ivy, or build those teetering towers of luggage in the screened-in porch? Meandering through town, I note your boarded-up attic window, your purple awning, your gray-and-white cat limp as a washrag on the front step, ticking them off in my mind almost ritualistically, the way, as a child, I used to count the banister rails when running down the stairs.
How can I say this without overstepping the bounds of propriety? I feel like your house is my house. No, I wouldn’t go inside without being invited, or even cross your lawn, but your home is part of my habitat. Feelings are not bound by property lines. When I walk out my front door, my path flows across my front porch and down the steps to a sidewalk that leads me straight into your geraniums. Sometimes I feel like the whole portion of the city I can reach on foot is a multifarious, busy, wildly checkered extension of my house. The word habitat comes from the Latin verb habitare, a frequentative form of the verb habere, which means to have or hold. Habitation is an intense and repetitive form of having. What’s the difference between walking from my kitchen to my living room, or from my front porch to yours? It’s just a longer walk.
Do you feel the same way about my house? The walls we painted coral, the porch where the cushions are perpetually falling off the swing, the chaos of rosemary, lavender, peppers, and weeds in the front yard, and the big redbud threatening to engulf the sidewalk?
Tonight I walked past your house and all your belladonna lilies were in bloom. They stood upright in your yard, frail and vital at once, vegetal and ghostly, their color rising like mist in the dusk, turning the whole street pink. I thought of the care you had taken to plant these flowers that would bloom for such a short time before being withered by the heat and flattened by the rainstorms. And I hoped that you would stay around for a long time, neighbor, with your flowers and motorcycles, your bushes and boxes, your trellises and broken cars, your windchimes and outdated campaign posters and dog bowls and beds of kale that constitute my habitat, and without which I would not recognize my home.
