Winter Break

One of the (many) things that displeases me about winter is how, right about the end of January, it starts to dawn on me that I no longer have any friends.

We moved to Asheville in sunshine and warm evenings and forged solid friendships with our neighbors on the sidewalk in front of our house. Talk of grilling in the yard floated in the air, but we didn't really need to eat together to create camaraderie. Here it was, right outside our front door, absent any reason to expend undue effort.

But now it's winter, and all I spot outside our front door are the fleeting forms of bundled-up dog owners racing through the arctic air with their pooches and, twice now, our neighbor's chickens fruitlessly scratching at the hard, grassless dirt of the front yards up and down the block.

It's not like we spent our warm California winters buddying up to our neighbors, but at least we had the option. To be honest, we were kind of surprised when Eric and Fernando, our Long Beach neighbors to the north, invited us to the party celebrating the completion of construction on their new, mustard-colored house. Hubby had engaged in a vigorous trash can dispute with them when we first moved in, consisting of silently pushing our shared can in front of their gate when they left it blocking ours and finding it back in front of ours the following morning. He finally locked it up securely inside our yard like a forbidden totem, desperately wished for, temptingly close, but denied. They acquired their own can from the city and thereafter we gave each other friendly waves and not much else in the way of social offering.

The warm Long Beach weather actually cut against any possibility of friendship with our neighbors in the apartment building to the south. Mild, beach-tinged nights allowed Apartment 4 to host frat-like parties that spilled out into the hallway on the other side of our wall throughout the year. The woman in Apartment 2 liked to have passionate 2:30 a.m. cell phone conversations under our bedroom window even in the dead of winter despite Hubby's repeated admonishments to "MOVE IT INSIDE!" I did become friendly with a young mother from the building whom I occasionally spotted as I sat in front of our house in the desperate days when The Boy was old enough to want entertainment but too young to provide it for himself and I was desperate to talk to someone -- anyone -- who could speak my adult language. But she lived on the far side of the building from us, and we weren't quite friendly enough to displace my certainty that every person making their way up or down the front steps was the evil sleep stealer driving us away from snow-less, ice-less climes.

So, too, I'm aware that one can get too much of a good neighbor and perhaps prefer a few months away from the glare of their scrutiny. A sort of detante period to keep relations friendly.

We had no such declared retreat in West Hollywood, where bare-chested Barry (if the thermometer dipped below 65 he covered up with a slumped bathrobe) passed out bon mots about the residents like free samples of Boca Burgers to the shoppers in Wild Oats. There was something truly comforting about having all the neighbors gather sympathetically around our home after the police apprehended the man who had climbed through our living room window at five in the morning by yelling, "Get down! Get down!" and cuffing him on our front lawn as he emerged from the vacant unit next door showered and wearing clothes he had stolen some days earlier from the next house down the block. But I used to grow anxious walking leisurely Roxanne home from the park for fear of being swooped down upon by the lonely guy who lay in wait for people to regale with stories of his wealth and business acumen.

One of the early joys of finding ourselves in Asheville was the neighborhood and, more specifically, the neighbors. We were reminded of how many potential friendships lay within a one-block radius at a Christmas Eve party from which we emerged certain we would be throwing dinner parties every weekend of 2008 and forging life-long friendships, the kind where your kids play with their kids so you don't end up the loser parents who still haven't found a sitter they'd leave their boy with five months after moving to their new home.

There have been, I need not say, no dinner parties.

Which is why I was so grateful for yesterday's brilliance of sun and temperatures in the fifties. This description aptly fits the California winter days of my childhood when we used to bundle ourselves in our down ski parkas, walk the dogs a couple of blocks, and hurry home to drink hot chocolate in front the fire my father had waiting for us. But now that I am a winter-hardy gal, I welcome fifty degrees as an invitation to take The Boy to the park, where other families are enjoying the break in winter.

Usually, my social interaction with other parents at the park consists of directing small smiles in their direction designed to convey the sense that I am not averse to conversation but don't presume to be one of the established members of their social circle. Generally, my smiles seem to have been received in this unfortunate manner, and I find myself talking only to The Boy. Such conversation consists of sparkling phrases like, "Don't put sand in your mouth," and "Yes, that's a dog!"

But yesterday brought a new revelation: Almost Walking. The Boy, so shy when traversing the playground safe in Mommy's arms, gamely tried some walking-while-holding-Mommy's-fingers-for-balance. He discovered this practice has multiple benefits. First, it allows one to make one's way, repeatedly, with no end in sight, back to the steps of the jungle gym where, after a little boost, one can crawl with the speed of a greyhound puppy to the top of the slide and force Mommy to push small children out of the way before one tries to go down head first without her. Second, after an exhilarating slide down the slide in Mommy's lap -- angled awkwardly to create enough clearance for us to pick up some speed -- one lands on one's feet, one's lungs unconstricted and thus primed to give a particularly hearty cry of excitement. One can also lead Mommy with hands clutched around her fingers in full exploration of the underside of the jungle gym because she has to bend over painfully to hold one's hands anyhow, and so needn't worry about head clearance.

Best of all, once The Boy was semi-independently ambulatory, he found himself in the midst of other kids. Kids who talked to him and then asked me why he didn't seem to understand what they were saying. "He's 13 months old," didn't satisfactorily answer the question for them, it seemed, but it helped me save face with the nearby parents who, based on The Boy's height, might have taken him for a two-year-old lagging sadly behind in his development.

While The Boy couldn't talk to the other kids, he could yell at them, often without their notice, but with great brio nonetheless. And when he yelled, touched, crawled past the other kids, it often prompted their parents to speak to me. Or me to speak to their parents, frequently in terms of apology -- on The Boy's behalf for crawling right through the line for the slide and on my own behalf for sliding down without first checking to make sure the 22-month-old had who went before us had cleared out from the bottom. Embarrassing, yes, especially when the child's mother calls to him in a panic to move out of the way. But it has been a long time since I had to observe slide etiquette.

I'm not saying that I walked home with my pockets full of new friends' phone numbers, or even that our conversations made it past "How old is s/he?" But for the first time I felt like I was part of the playground community. No longer must I huddle in desperate, dead-ended conversation with the other pariah-parents relegated to the sandbox. Somehow, on this sunny day warm enough for me to lumber up and down the slide in nothing more than a sweater and jeans, I discovered a place where people interact and belong and really live -- outside the cocoon of their heated homes -- in the winter.

With breaks like this, maybe I'll even find myself hosting a dinner party before the summer solstice.