Long Driveway

To the people I've lived next to

He was only a boy when I met him. I was only 10. There is a strange wide eyed expression on our faces. We both have water guns, the ‘bullets’ are being fired over the car parked in the driveway. Ecstatic. Thrilling.

I put the photo down. There is a stack below it, each one a window into a life I no longer recognise. He moved away when I was 10. They just packed up and left one day in the summer. Earlier that week we had fried an egg on the footpath, like in a book. It actually fried!

The family who lived there before him had two sons. They got a huge new three wheel bike that could fit two people at once and we rode around the neighbourhood constantly. Racing, playing. We would take turns driving in some imaginary game. He had a younger brother called Omar who was only 5 or 6 and he had his own tricycle. I think he always wanted in on our games, but he was too young to ‘get’ it.

That year my family got a trampoline. They were over all the time. Sometimes they would come over just for the trampoline. We had so many games - I can barely remember them now. Their mother used to always yell their names from the front door of their house to call them back home.

They moved away at some point, but I barely remember when that happened. As far as I knew, one day they lived there and the next they didn’t.

Then a new family moved in. They had a son, who was my age. He and I became fast friends and formed a trio with our other neighbour. She had two sisters, one of which was my sister's age. She liked to be called Lady. Their younger sister was only 3 and we all loved looking after her. We started planting potatoes together. First in my garden and then when we ran out of room there, we started growing them in hers. Their dad was studying a PHD at the university and it was something to do with grapes. They had a grape vine around the front of their house, but they all had heaps of seeds.

Me and my neighbours were inseparable. In the summer holidays we would bike around and go on the trampoline, and watch movies and make lemonade. We would spend every day together. My family started going to the same church as our grape vine neighbours. They would wear these incredible outfits and my parents always worried we weren’t dressed up enough in comparison.

The week the boy and his family moved away nothing was different. The knowledge of their leaving affected nothing at all in the way we played. We did all the same things, biking, running, playing with water guns, bouncing on the trampoline. The day they left we all took photos together, which felt strangely awkward - we had never taken photos together before.

After they left I stopped biking. I went on the trampoline with my sister, but she was too scared to bounce super high. A new family moved in. But before them there was a student from China who got us these beautiful red Christmas tree decorations. My sister and I were obsessed with them. They were dragons made out of wood and yarn and the yarn would dangle down and we would pretend they were alive.

Then the grape vine neighbours moved away too. They moved to Motueka and the boy and his parents had moved back to Nepal. Their fathers had both finished their PHDs and got jobs elsewhere. The street was never really the same. The woman who moved in next door was called Mrs. Large, which I thought was funny, and her mail kept getting put in our letterbox by accident. A new family moved into the house in front. They had a baby daughter who my sister and I couldn’t get enough of. They would invite us over to hold her.

We watched her grow from a baby to a toddler, and then that spring we were the ones to move away.