...home?

We were the last house at the end of the culdesac, but aside from our family and the two on either side of us, everyone in our little circle mostly kept to themselves.

That was the last neighborhood I lived in where the grass was really green, which was weird because you never really saw anyone outside taking care of their lawns. For most of the folks living in the six or seven houses down there, you never really even saw them. My neighbor Jonathan and I were really the only people who frequented the world outside. Scott and his brother Adam at the end of the street would occasionally join us riding our bikes around the culdesac. Adam mainly came around to show off how awesome his bike was, and beat up anyone ballsy enough to touch it. I was ballsy enough.

We were all younguns, so the stop sign at the end of the street was as far as we were allowed to go. Anywhere past that was a mystery.

Another mystery (to me, at least) was the fact that I never saw anybody's parents. It seemed like Scott and Adam, both of which weren't much older than I, lived on their own. The same goes for Allison, the girl right across the street from us. The only exception really was the couple next door, who didn't even have any kids.

That being said, the little box that was our world, going from our house to the stop sign, pretty much felt like a community of children living on their own. We all "knew" each other (purely a first name basis), but you didn't really KNOW more than one or two folks. Jonathan was my exception. There was that one time I kissed Julia, the girl a few houses down, but that was just weird.

It was a strange neighborhood, but a good one. Eventually we moved away, but ten years later, Jonathan is still one of my best friends in the world. The weirdest thing is how the that was the last time I actually had the sense of a neighborhood community, even though I didn't really "know" most of the other kids in the neighborhood, I still knew them. We had that sense of community, which is something I've never felt just by living in proximity to people ever since.