Growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, the cinder-block walls separating my family’s yard and the next-door neighbors’ were not to be breached. My brother discovered this when he climbed over to retrieve a ball and was bloodied by a pair of Irish setters defending their turf. Otherwise, we had little interaction with the people whose daily lives and personal dramas were playing out a few feet away from ours.
It was the same in the half-dozen other places I’ve lived since then, urban and suburban, apartment tower and townhouse—even the “planned community” my family moved to when I was in high school. Community isn’t something that can be planned.
So it’s a little ironic that, when my husband, Matt, and I moved to Upper Jay 15 years ago, my mother
