http://polaroid41.com/side-by-side/
Sunday, September 26th, 2021 - 4:43pm.
I grew up living in houses, big three and four-bedroom houses, from the time I was born until I left for college at age 18. Living in the dorms my freshman year at the University of Iowa was the first time I lived in such proximity to other people. Now I’ve spent well over half my lifetime as an apartment dweller, and I’ve gotten used to having neighbors living really close. Our building in Toulouse is tall, nine stories, and there are two apartments on each floor plus a building caretaker on the ground floor. We’re the only family with a small child, and the building is mostly populated with couples or wealthy, older residents.
My son is a city kid, and the only homes he’s ever known have been apartments. For the first two years of his life, he shared our 1-bedroom apartment in Paris. We moved to Toulouse when he was two, a much smaller city and a much bigger apartment by comparison, but city life nonetheless, and I’m aware that his childhood looks so much different from mine.
We don’t have a yard, but we live across the street from a beautiful park where Elliot plays almost every single day. After dinner, he likes to hop up and say “Je vais au 5ieme !”, “I’m going to the 5th floor!” Just upstairs from us, Elliot has befriended a young couple with a dog. Elliot loves to go up and show them his Lego creations, chat and play with their border collie. Sometimes they go out and walk the dog together or take him to the dog park. I wonder if hanging out with Elliot has them imagining what it’d be like to be parents some day.
He also often goes down to the 3rd floor, the home of his honorary grandmother. She moved into the building around the same time as us, and she has always been so indulgent with the (not so gentle) pitter-patter of Elliot’s feet. They play cards together and eat chocolates, and she keeps fruit juice on hand just for him. My husband isn’t much interested in Christmas tree decorating and our neighbor doesn’t like to set up a tree just for herself, so she always comes up to decorate ours with Elliot and me.
In the spring of 2020, during the first two months of the pandemic, France was on an incredibly strict, house-arrest style lockdown. You could only go outside for one hour a day carrying a government permission form, you could go no farther than .6 miles from home, and you were not allowed to see anyone who lived outside your home, even for a walk, even outdoors. We were all completely cut off from each other.
A few weeks in, word got around via social media that at 8pm people were going to go to their windows or balconies and clap for healthcare workers. We hadn’t changed the clocks for daylight’s savings time yet, so at the end of March at 8pm it was still dark outside. We ventured out on our terrace in the night and at eight o’clock, we started to clap. Suddenly, the sound of other hands clapping and voices cheering began to echo all around us. It was our first human contact with others since the pandemic started. We stuck our heads out over our railing and looked to the balconies below ours, there were neighbors waving up! We looked up and saw faces smiling down! It became our nightly rendezvous, our ritual, our way to say, “We’re still here!” As the weeks rolled on and the days got longer, it was still daylight at 8pm, and we could see people waving to us from balconies in the distance. We waved back and cheered, Elliot brought instruments, bells and whistles and jumped and cheered with all his might.
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