For Wilshire Baptist Church
The house across the street from us is getting a new paint job this week. It’s a wonderful old wood-frame house with a good front porch, big windows, some intricate woodwork and nice roof lines and angles all around. From the street you couldn’t really tell it needed fresh paint, but the owners know best.
According to the tax rolls, the house was built in 1948, so it’s 11 years older than me. It reminds me of the houses on the small-town streets where my grandparents lived. I grew up in suburbia where concrete slab foundations and brick veneer walls were the latest and greatest thing. Admittedly, there’s a lot to be said for the strength of bricks and concrete, but wood-frame houses on pier-and-beam foundations have always had a certain appeal to me. Somehow, they’ve always felt more “alive”; something about the slight bounce of the floorboards and the almost-perceptible movement of the wood behind the walls gives the house a living, breathing feel.
Maybe it’s for that reason when I came back to the Dallas area after my first job in Waco – where I lived in an over-the-garage apartment built in the late 1800s – I was attracted to the old style. Following some years of exile in apartments and condos, I lived in a couple of wood-frame rent houses, and when I finally bought a house, the exterior was stone, but it was pier-and-beam with hardwood maple floors.
When LeAnn and I built our current house together, we chose that woody, alive feel mostly because we wanted to fit into the old Embree neighborhood of Garland with its wood-frame houses dating to the early 20th century, including the house across the street. Wilshire member and neighbor Kay Moore knows that house well because it’s the house she came home to with her parents after she was born. We didn’t know Kay or her story at the time, but when we bought the vacant lot across the street, we wanted to build in a way that respected the families that had settled the area decades before us.
The current owners across the street have been there some 30 years. They’ve been great neighbors in the 13 years we’ve been on the street. We watch out for each other through potential worries such as storms, stray animals, fireworks and strangers passing through with questionable intentions. Before the painting started this week, they let us know so we could move anything we didn’t want to get sprayed. That really wasn’t a concern with the distance, but I returned the favor by making sure the wind wasn’t blowing toward their house when I started my first lawn mowing of the season.
Good neighbors seemed a regular thing in the neighborhoods I grew up in. There were always some odd balls or folks we didn’t have much in common with, but we knew most of our neighbors well enough to trust them with important stuff such as watching the house and collecting the mail when we were out of town.
Good neighboring is not something you learn in a class; it’s mostly passed through families by good modeling. I learned it from my parents, and they learned it from their parents. I experienced it during summer visits to my grandparents when they’d walk us around to sit in the parlors of their neighbors for conversations and refreshments. And, some of my earliest memories are of being carried home at night from across the street by my parents after being babysat by the couple there.
Today, being neighborly seems like a lost art. In our Embree neighborhood, we’ve had a loosely organized neighborhood association for the past dozen years. We have periodic gatherings, and while we’ve invited everyone in the 100-plus homes in the neighborhood, we mostly have the same 20-30 people each time. Maybe the other folks are too busy, but I believe some just aren’t interested in “neighboring” as it might be called. Or maybe they think we have fees and rules, but we don’t collect dues and we don’t tell people how to live.
The house across the street is being painted a light green with beige and burgundy trim. It’s a nod to the classic color palettes of the past, and a fresh look for the future. It’s going to be great to look over and see it every day.