Just across the driveway from the increasingly paint-needy Observatory on Maple Street, there’s a rent house that has been a rent house for almost all the long years Yours Truly and Spouse and Junior have lived in Little Rock. When we first moved to Maple, the family who lived there owned the joint outright, but they sold it and decamped to the boonies when Junior was around 4. The man of the house, his youthful six-pack long since multiplied to a keg, was prone to barbecuing shirtless over a burning drum in the yard. Their dog, meanwhile, was equally prone to singing along with great, passionate feeling whenever he heard a distant ambulance siren at UAMS — which was often, at all hours of the day and night. So we can’t exactly say we were sad to see them go when they packed their mournful dog and sold out lock, stock and burning barrel.

Though renters get a bad rap, we’ve been lucky with neighbors, we suppose. No power drinkers or wife-beaters, no screaming arguers or kleptomaniacs, no stealthy midnight peepers that we know of (and God help them if they are, as our own sixer has gone keg as well). About every two years or so, a U-Haul truck appears in the yard to be loaded, followed by another some days or weeks later, laden with household goods, to be trundled inside. Mostly, our neighbors stick to themselves and we are obliged to let them. Even in The Good Ol’ Days of porch swings and sweat-varnished, pre-AC Little Rock summers, we suspect it was so then as well. What’s that the man said about good fences making good neighbors? When the houses are packed in as tight as they are down here in Stifft Station, sometimes a polite silence unless spoken to is the best fence of all.

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There have been times over the years when we have been spoken to and spoken back, of course. Like the folks who shared a beer or two with us before realizing that we’re more boring than they are. The nice young man and his equally charming wife who disappeared some weeks after he sat on the steps of The Observatory one spring evening and told us of her miscarriage and his quest to find some cause for it: radon or paint fumes or just the misalignment of the stars. The little neighbor kids who, not privy yet to invisible fences, stood in the yard and quizzed The Observer until our ears nearly dropped off about everything and anything, from our moody cats and equally moody t’weenage Junior to our bicycle and Spouse’s car and how a raven is like and unlike a writing desk. The Observer is always happy to talk to the folks who want to talk. We bear more than a little guilt for letting so many occupants of the house next door slip in and out without Yours Truly learning so much as their names.

The new neighbor’s name is Andre. We know this because last week, he came over to inquire and commiserate, his entire paycheck, cashed and accidentally left in the center console of his car, having been boosted in the night by the five-finger discounters who seem to haunt Little Rock like a whispering plague, making off with everything that ain’t padlocked securely to a fire hydrant or police officer’s leg. The Observer, as you know if you’ve read this column for a while, is no stranger to that feeling. Little Rock is our home, and we love her, we told our new neighbor. But it is a town where people will give you the shirt off their back by day, then come back and steal it by night. Simultaneously a big-hearted, hard-luck town, but one that took in The Observer and our lovely bride and little son many moons back, when we needed safe harbor after adventuring abroad.

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Turns out our new neighbors are wanderers as well. They stuck it out in Flint, Mich., as long as they could, he said, as long as the city was delivering water that wouldn’t slowly poison his children. When that lead-free lifeline dried up, though, they fled to Little Rock, where his wife’s family lives. Turns out she’s another Little Rock boomerang baby, just like The Observer.

Andre and Yours Truly both seem determined to break the cold that has hovered between the rent house next door and The Observatory over the years, calling each other by name and offering hearty waves whenever we see each other out and about. It costs nothing, The Observer realizes, and is worth everything. We’ve already thinking of buying extra beer, in the hopes that this summer, when The Observer and Spouse take to the veranda to watch the bats swoop past the nightwatcher across the way, our neighbor and his lovely wife will drop over for a brew or least a chilly glass of unpoisoned water. We can cuss Trump and gripe about the heat, like proper acquaintances. The Observer can share what little we know of Michigan and Andre can lend us his impressions of Arkansas, and there in the dark, we can just be once strangers united by proximity, now neighbors, our invisible walls breached, watching fireflies in the humid dark, refugees who have found refuge at last.

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