I never thought of my house as being part of a neighborhood. When I think of a neighborhood, I think of identical houses arranged 25 feet apart from each other with a culdesac at the end of the block and sidewalks so you can go on late night walks with your dog. People that live in a neighborhood seem to have block parties every weekend of the summer with junk food and yard games. I sometimes wish I lived in that type of neighborhood; a neighborhood where everyone had the same enormous house with a miniature window above the front door so you could see the glass chandelier glistening in the golden sunlight.

I grew up on a tiny road right off of a highway. I wouldn’t even call it a road because it doesn’t even have lines. There are only seven houses on my road; only seven! They don’t even look the same. Some are white, some are tan, while one is yellow. Less than half of the houses have multiple floors and the others are just one floor. Whether or not one has a chandelier; I’m not exactly sure. There aren’t any sidewalks so no one really goes for any late night strolls and there’s definitely not a culdesac. Because of this, my road hasn’t had a trick-or-treator in at least twenty years. No block parties, no junk food and no yard games. Just people that have one thing in common: they all live on the same road.

My house is a one story ranch that is currently pale yellow with burgundy shutters, front door and mailbox. We have an uphill driveway that has a pull off for my dad to park his dark green Silverado. Across the street is a median and then across the median is a ditch and then the highway. There isn’t much to say about the front yard besides the fact that we live on a hill. In the spring water runs down the hill creating a mud hole on the median. In the winter there’s always someone getting launched down the hill on a sled, ending up in the middle of the median.

Everyone in my undersized neighborhood seems to have an oversized back yard. There’s plenty of space to run around and play various sports. Three out of the seven houses have fire pits that get put to good use in the summer. A couple houses have in-ground pools and some have giant gardens. We don’t have a pool but we are the only house that has a pond visited by numerous wildlife.

The location of my road is sort of the best of both worlds. We are close enough to the city to get city water and the sewer system but we are far enough into the country where the only noises you hear are people on their lawn mowers in the summer. There aren’t any street lights to keep our bedrooms illuminated during hours of darkness and we don’t live out in the middle of nowhere so it doesn’t take us a half hour to get to the grocery store. Instead of the constant smell of car exhaust, we get the stench of cow manure once a year.

My neighborhood doesn’t have the typical commotion of an ordinary neighborhood, but it definitely feels like I live next door to my neighbors.