Establishing that important connection, with one’s neighbors, something that we don’t see enough of these days! Translated…
There was, a clothing rod on the back lanai that’s, “historical”, and other than it being my mother’s best helper when she did the laundry, it was, something that help lit up Aunty Chang’s life from opposite of us.
something that looks like this…photo from online…
From when I was eight when we moved in, it’d been over forty years now. Recalling how we’d moved, from the public housing complexes in the countryside to Taipei, everything was, oh so brand new; the shingle-and-concrete houses became an apartment with the stairs, without the yard, but with the front and back balconies instead, the pebble-paved flooring, replaced with the blue-and-white tiles, unlike how we can hop around, jump up and down in our old dormitories, otherwise, we’d, become too, noisy for the neighbors…………oh, and we can’t get out of the house, and turn the corner, to get to our neighbors’ houses, we can only stand on our lanais, through the steel windows, to talk to the neighbors now.
Aunty Chang was living closest to us, back then, the sound barriers weren’t set up as well as today, we can hear the goings-on of our neighbors’ homes; and, there would always be the sound of dialect coming from back, with a woman in Mandarin, with a thick, Taiwanese accent, that’s, caught our attention. The back lanai was the most widely used place in our home, other than hanging up the laundries, my mother would chop the chickens up there, to prevent the spattering of the oils; and, Aunty Chang’s kitchen was a built-in of her lanai, and so, our two residences, became connected.
illustrations from the papers online…
After awhile, every time I’d gone out back, and saw Uncle and Aunty Chang, I’d greeted them. And, for a long time, I’d not seen Uncle Chang, and later on, we’d learned, that he had, passed from an illness. And because Aunty Chang didn’t have children, my mother would often greet and show her care and concern toward Aunty Chang from the back lanai, and when we have some goodies, she’d always thought about bringing some over from Aunty Chang too, and my mother came up with a way—she’d, placed what she wanted to give to Aunty Chang in a bag, tied it to the front of the cloth hanging rod, then, stuck it out of the steel windows of our home, to give it to Aunty Chang.
And, that hanging rod had, delivered a ton of warmth to Aunty Chang over the years, until she’d, moved away. We met, by chance, and connect by caring for one another, use that hanging rod, we’d, made these beautiful memories that we’d, come to share.
And this, is how they’d, cared about one another in the old days, and, we just, don’t connect like that anymore, I wonder why??? Perhaps, in this day and age, everybody gets too caught up in the nitty-gritty’s of day-to-day living, that we forgot, to establish these, small, but needed and important connections with our neighbors…