The Comforts of Community: What Weeding, Soccer, and a Loose Tooth Taught Me About the People I Need

Just yesterday, on a fine, sunny Sunday afternoon, my husband and I were doing some weeding in our front yard. For us, “some weeding” means cursing and huffing and puffing our way through a summer’s worth of work. We are not natural gardeners, let’s just say, and combining that with a summer that was so ungodly hot much of the time meant that we pretty much let the weeds win for the months of July and August. But suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore — or maybe I just wanted a clear area for the autumn leaves to fill up (sigh) — and after Daniel’s soccer game, I went out and gloved up and got to work. Before long, the kids came out and zoomed around on their bikes and scooters around me, and then my husband came out and joined the effort.

I hate weeding. Like, really, really hate it, but I do like how getting this tedious, often painful (in thorn-bush encounters and bug bites) job done gives  me a nice sense of accomplishment. More significantly though, it ends up being, along with a few other repetitive and annoying household maintenance chores, meditative, and I always forget that until I get started and my mind gets going. Yesterday was one of those times.

It was perhaps because we’d just returned from the soccer field, but my meditative thought of choice yesterday was community. This Sunday had been Daniel’s second game of the fall season, and he’s on a new team this year. That said, we already know a handful of the other third grade boys on the team, and their parents. I didn’t know who his coach was when I got his initial email a few weeks ago, but as soon as we showed up for the first game and saw his wife, I realized that, in fact, I knew her. It turns out that I know — it occurred to me as I yanked some stubborn, where-did-this-crap-come-from weeds from under the azaleas — a lot of people, without actually ever having tried to go out and meet people.

I meet people at our religious ed program, on the soccer field, in library programs, and of course at school. I tell you, I felt such a strong sense of… I don’t know what to call it — contentment? Belonging-ness? — yesterday when the coach’s wife (who I recognized from our parental religious ed class right away, but wasn’t sure she did) walked up to me and said, “I finally placed your face! I knew I knew you!” So simple, yet so elemental. You know me. We know each other.

I have community. There are people out there in and around our town, which is not geographically or in terms of population a small town at all, who recognize my face or know my name, who see how I’m connected to other people (Oh, that’s Daniel’s mom — you know Daniel, he was in Emma’s kindergarten class. Or, Yes, I remember you from Miss Debbie’s preschool — remember that adorable Halloween concert the kids had? How did James do last year?), and who, even though it’s “only” in an interconnected-community, six-degrees kind of way, care.

This is both a small and easy to see phenomenon, and a huge thing for me to have realized. I tend to be a pretty solitary person, not making friends very easily. When we moved to this suburb from the city nearly 7 years ago, I had a one-year old and a job that took me back, by train, to the city I was far more familiar with. It took ages (let’s face it, until the kids started school) to really feel like I had ground under my feet here.

My first week in our house, my husband took off for a business trip, so there I was, a suburban mom-of-baby, and I felt terribly strange and alone. The week he was away included Halloween, and I remember suddenly realizing, it’s Halloween! People will be out and about! I stuck a cowboy hat on the baby, strapped him in his stroller, and sat on the porch with him and the bowl of candy I’d hastily purchased, and smiled manically at the people who came to trick or treat. Not many smiled back.

It takes a while to build community.

So back to the weeding. My brain, realizing that it wouldn’t do to dwell on my aching back and itching bites, or the fact that there was still a swath of un-weeded area over on the other side of the driveway, took off on a bizarre tangent. I started by thinking about how, that week at soccer practice, in a freak occurrence while the boys warmed up, Daniel took a soccer cleat in the mouth, which left him a little scratched and with a newly loose tooth (a baby one!). And I was thinking about how the next day, the coach emailed to see how he was. And how he has my email as well as all the other parents. Then, I looked up to watch my husband at work in a different part of the yard (the boys had long since given up on us). That’s when the weird thoughts started putting their weed-like roots in my head. What if something happened to him, something awful? There’s no comfort anywhere in that thought, except for this:

I’d have community. Emails would go around. Casseroles would arrive, and offers from moms to pick up the boys for soccer, from dads to help remove the gunk from my gutters.

I have some very close and dear friends in my life — not many, but I don’t need many of those, the people who are, as they say, my tribe: fellow writers who get my lifestyle; the precious few other moms with whom I’ve developed just-us-women relationships; old friends I don’t see enough. I do not confuse this community — the soccer moms, the class-lists, the churchgoers — with soulmates. But it occurred to me yesterday, about four mosquito bites (for heaven’s sake, it’s September!) into my weeding adventure, that the new suburban mom I was seven Halloweens ago, smiling manically on my porch, probably wouldn’t have believed I needed more than my truly close friends or more than my husband (who, cliche alert, really is my best friend).

But I do need them. And I’m glad I have them. And Coach Steve, if you’re reading: Thanks for the email, for understanding and not caring that Daniel is not an athlete but is game to try, and for bringing a Box of Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts yesterday morning.

What’s your community like?