Home is Where you Hang your (Neighbor's) Keys

1970s neighbors. We had them. We loved them.

We ambled over to each other's homes several times a week to borrow items, to talk about vacation plans, to see if anyone wanted extra pie, to pilfer a fat and stable candle for the Halloween pumpkin, to stack wood, to help shovel sidewalks, to discuss the local hockey team. Sharing a driveway, we left our keys in our cars so anyone needing to move one to the street and then scoot out was kindly unencumbered. We were a tight bunch.

I do wonder if some of that tightness could also have been a result of having had the same exact house key.

Yes, the
same
exact
key.

Our home's sleek silver skeleton key opened ours and the front doors of three other homes on my block. The men who built our neigborhood in the early 1900s, deliberately or not, used the same key and lock set four times in a row on my side of the street.

Our front door had something called a mortise style lock. All you had to do was press a little convex bit of metal with your thumb and once it recessed, the door handle was in a secure, no budge, position. Two small M&M sized circles, forming a tiny brown snowman of sorts, lined up vertically on the inside edge of our door and the door butted up squarely against the jamb. If you hit one of those circles with your hip when carrying in a week's worth of brown paper grocery bags, or brushed them with your elbow while shoving the door with one arm and using the other to nudge the wet dog toward the kitchen so she couldn't shake mud on the colonial soldier wallpaper in the itty bitty foyer, then there's a good chance it was going to lock. But, as I said, it was truly no problem if you got caught on the outside looking in sans key. All you had to do was walk next door.

Passing over our shared crunchy gravel driveway, you'd reach the Poitier's front entrance in about five Red Rover style steps. Their house had the same layout as ours, as did the one next to theirs, and the one next to that one (hence the four identical keys.)

From where we sat, Pam and Bub Poitier seemed to have wondrous enthusiasm for everyday life. In the mornings, we'd see them rise before the sun and jog casually toward the high school track; or, if it was too wintry for sneakers, wax up their fiberglass cross country skis and glide down the snow-covered pavement, pompom hats set back upon their heads. On summer afternoons, they'd climb out their bedroom window and onto the lower level rooftop. Then, with sizeable mugs of sun brewed tea poured over ice, they would, in modest swimwear, lay idle on faded yellow towels from one of their many trips to St. Croix. Trim and fit, they exclusively wore LL Bean and Orvis clothing long before people thought looking like they were on a perpetual hike was cool.

I loved going to their home, relaxing on the lemonade porch across from their teenaged son, playing backgammon with their ebony stained and blonde glazed walnut pieces. Bub was an accomplished woodworker and willingly shared not only his beautifully refined board game but a slew of other home crafted pieces with my family. We had a handmade mailbox the size of a loaf of bread with a glossy finish and a gold plated knob, a six foot tall sturdy stand for Mom's always-reproducing spider plants, and a set of very groovy 70s inspired words (and arrows) that were secured with sawtooth picture hangers on the wall of our interior staircase. One said UP and the other DOWN (with arrows correspondingly placed in case anybody was confused, I suppose). He built our back yard picnic table, our cherry wood bird feeder, and a lovely set of book ends for my dog eared Judy Blumes.

The Poitier house was welcoming and toasty warm, especially from October through March when they constantly burned a fragrant log in their living room fireplace and governed a woodstove, downright tropical, in their back room. This form of home heating ensured that the Poitier family smelled a little like bacon at all times. When having something on loan from them, whether it was a recipe book or a record album or a gauzy gown for a school play, I'd press my nose to the object and inhale deeply a fragrance so Adirondacky and cabinesque.

We spent many holidays at our neighbors' home. We showed up on a few Christmas Eves, the occasional New Year's Day and always on the Fourth of July. They had dishes of Greek olives, backyard fireworks and Van Morrison and The Little River Band on their stereo. Their all-American, ruddy-faced, athletic older nephews would join in from across town, and from my corner chair vantage point with a napkin of oily olives in my lap, I'd behold their easy togetherness. So preppy, outdoorsy, and self-assured; eating hands full of Charlie's Chips from buff colored home delivered circular tins and singing along to all the modern records with gusto, not caring if crumbs were spilling down their wrinkled oxford cloth shirts onto their penny tucked Weejuns.

They had one telephone that I know of in that house. It was yellow, securely mounted to the kitchen wall with an extra, extra, extra long springy cord, stretched out and devoid of some of its coil. If someone was eating in the dining room, you could easily bring them the receiver from the kitchen. The entire outer cover of the phone was plastered with blue oval Chiquita banana stickers. I never asked why but it seemed the epitome of careless cool. Eat a banana, stick a sticker on the phone. I miss that sort of kitsch. Our current insatiability for perfect decor has, for me at least, ruined all of that ironic fun. Give me a banana phone any day.

My father put our home up for sale when he got remarried and wife #2 decided she didn't want to live on the best freaking street in the universe. The Poitiers moved soon thereafter, and Bub has regrettably passed away, but I reconnected with Pam during the Christmas season of 2018. I wrote her my very first 'letter to friends' which detailed much of what I shared here along with a few other personal thoughts. So, not only were the Poitiers dear friends and fantastic neighbors, they are, for me, inspirations of the best possible kind. They, among others, have inspired me to enjoy the out of doors, to be creative, to open my house for holiday gatherings, and they have inspired me to write.

Three cheers for good neighbors!

If you would like, I can introduce you to more neighbors in future posts.
We had a bandleader, a professional ball player, and more!
Comments are welcome.


(P.S. Pam and Bub Poitier are not my neighbors' names. I have changed them in the spirit of being neighborly since I have not asked permission from Pam for this post.)

#neighbors #1970s #VanMorrison #LittleRiverBand #CharliesChips #Chiquita #backgammon #lemonadeporch #LLBean #Orvis #mortise #skeletonkey #JudyBlume #Weejuns #greekolives #mushroomtumbler