by: Natalee Whitesell
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Our family moved into the Butler Sullivan neighborhood 10 years ago. We bought a mill house and began making a home. I was then pregnant with my fourth child and I began setting up things up in this 1935 bungalow that had lots of history lived in it before me. I kind of felt this weight, this weightiness of generations before me living in this house, but not like how I feel it now.
I was hesitant being in this new place, as I was the only white woman at the time on the street. Something had drawn me here. Maybe it was the years that I spent living abroad or the suffering that I was going through in my own life at the time or all of it. It had a lot to do with the 5th grader who yelled to me from across the street (when I was scoping out the house to see if we might be interested in buying it). This 5th grader said, “This is a good neighborhood! You will like it here.”
This family is now dear friends of ours. I had my own unknown racial biases moving onto my street. As the light does though, it warmly exposes and erodes over the years. It did its job on the nooks and crannies of my brain, where wrong thinking was alive, like weeds. The steady love and acceptance and persevering (in their own lives) of those around me pulled those weeds out, one by one.
When I moved into my house I was deeply entrenched in my own struggles. I did not have Joy. I wanted it, but I didn’t have it. This is in part why I felt at home on my street. The more I lived there, the more I felt its strength. People living in homes, doing their lives...one day at a time...just like me. They were making it in the community and lifting me out of the pit simply by their rhythms of an authentic life lived. One of my neighbors played the piano every single night. It was the same song of a few soulful notes that were pregnant with grief and hope. My kids have grown up hearing his song, wafting across summer nights, across dimensions. It was otherly, and the only notes he ever learned to play. I’ll bet he doesn’t know their power. You can be a master musician and not really make music like he did.
Yesterday I saw his piano get loaded up on a trailer and moved out of the neighborhood. I noticed that I was crying. A developer bought his house. I pray he was treated well, but even if he wasn’t, he would still smile and point to Jesus for what he got, because that’s the kind of solidness in this place.
Our neighborhood is changing rapidly before our eyes. I know these things happen. There’s grief involved here. There are tensions. My old neighbors would shoo my escape artist labradoodle back into the fence, with patience...and force. “Baxter, get back in that fence!!”
Some new neighbors shampooed my dog and sent it back with the police “to teach us a lesson.” I want to judge the latter, but all I can do is see this same stuff in my own heart, and have hope that community and steady strong rhythms can forge new paths of light there as well. Like it did for me. The nature of this neighborhood is grace. And I would do best to yes, get a little angry at that belittling situation with my dog, (and maybe get an electric fence) but continue to welcome messes, as my neighbors have modeled for me.
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