How we come together when we can’t go very far. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. We walk the dogs across the meadow in the rain. We don’t talk much. We say the same things over and over, and yet somehow there’s comfort in the repetition. Yesterday someone wrote on the town listserv that certain dog owners had been spotted in the meadow less than six feet away from each other. Suddenly, everybody’s a cop, yardsticks in their minds. People are scared, and with good reason. But distance - the idea of distance. Were we so close to begin with? How far will we be from each other after this is over? The dogs, off leash, circle back to us. I’ve got the sense they know what’s going on, if not the particulars. But something is most definitely up. For starters, how come we’re all home all the time? Artic le has been generated by GSA Conte nt Gen erator Dem oversi on!
Other rituals emerge, some old, some new. Sitting on the porch in Phoenix. Picking the citrus trees of once-anonymous neighbors in Los Angeles. The poles are built-in social distancing. No need for the measuring tape. Below are 13 American scenes, snapshots of neighbors finding original ways to reconnect. It’s good to walk in this rain. I’m not saying everything has become so precious these strange days. Only that you notice more, how the winter grass comes in so many shades of brown, the netless soccer goals upside down like lonely parallelograms (badly, I try and teach my kid math). And the way our talk goes nowhere but even empty words have a little more weight now, like the stones we throw when we pause at the brook. Peter Orner, from Norwich, Vt. Michele Grey began noticing them in early April: citrus trees ripe for the picking but out of arm’s reach. They studded front lawns and backyards in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Ms. Grey, Art 53, has lived for 20 years, and which she, her husband, Joaquin, and son, Lucas, have been exploring on daily walks since stay-at-home orders closed many local parks and trails.
Surely, they thought, someone could benefit from this bounty of oranges and lemons, if the owners of the trees didn’t want them themselves. They bought two 12-foot fruit pickers - think back scratchers, Artifical Intelligence but bigger - and Ms. Grey went on Nextdoor, an online community message board. She wrote that her family "would be happy to pick your fruit," at no cost, "supply you with some, donate to neighbors, and then provide some to nearby food banks." "We would wear masks and gloves and keep strict social distancing," she added. Over the past month, the Greys have collected about 1,000 pounds of fruit, most of which they’ve donated to food banks. Their newfound hobby has had an unexpected byproduct - regular meet-ups with strangers turned friends, like the Nilsson family, who live near the Greys. "They kept to themselves, and we never socialized much with them," besides an occasional "hi," Ms. Grey said.
Then there’s the young woman who lives up the hill from the Greys. She was walking down the street when Ms. Grey drove by, oranges practically falling off the back of her pickup truck. "I could tell that she was super-sad," Ms. Grey said. She pulled over and found out the woman was fresh off a breakup. "We started talking and now we’re taking oranges to her house," Ms. Grey said. Though the Greys initially used the internet to connect the citrus haves with the have-nots, they’re increasingly having more luck offline. "On our walks, I’m having massive interaction," said Joaquin Grey, plucking mandarins off a 30-foot tree belonging to another new acquaintance, Naomi Wong, on a recent Saturday. The chance meetings take many forms. While her husband and son tackled the mandarin tree, Ms. Grey sorted oranges into buckets and bags on the back of the truck, pausing anytime someone walked by. "Take as many as you want," she said to a man in a white face mask (he took three).