It's not friends, but it'll do - #156

Who waters your plants?

Mar 02, 2025

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I could see Chego in the street.

“Jibs, Chego is outside!” Jibs came running. Chego lives a few houses down, and along with Joey, Blixt, Freddie, and Dash, he’s one of the names that Jibs will get out of bed for. These are, of course, dogs. And on our side of town, you can run into Cody, Sunny, Nala, Misty, Coco, Ophie, Telly, Zia, and a few others. There’s only one dog whose name I don’t know, and it’s likely because I don’t know its person’s name either.

That—not knowing the person—is rare here. We know our neighbors.

When we first moved here, in an effort to be thoughtful, I kept a Note in my phone to help me remember names and anecdotes. Everyone was seemingly always wearing sunglasses, a hat, and a puffy, and it was honestly hard to tell people apart in the beginning. But the dogs helped. There was no mistaking a red retriever for a husky, or shepherd mutt for a lab. Those, I could keep straight.

But soon, the rhythms of the day and its people bore into your memory: the time they come home from school, who takes which car, when the dogs are let out. This community, at some 200 people, is small enough to learn even if you’re barely paying attention.

In the same way some people renew their vows, Ben and I like to renew or reaffirm our love for a place. Are you still happy here? Is this home?

As I launched and started sharing the Chosen Places project, I was reminded by many of you what an integral component friends are to choosing a home. There was only one time in my life that I chose where to live based on who lived there first: Washington, DC.

When I moved to DC from the British Virgin Islands, it was in a hurry. I was in trouble with Customs, and I needed to get out of the country quickly and permanently. I picked DC because it’s where I had the most friends. I showed up on their doorstep, very tan and very grateful. While those years were some of the most intimate in regards to friendships, I wasn’t happy. Trying to live in DC was like trying to wear pants that were both too tight and too long. I could make it work, but the longer I had on those pants, the more I wanted to get them off.

I had my people, but I did not have my place.

Now, I have my place. But do I have my people?

When looking for a place to land, a lot of people want to have friends there already. They want to have a sense of community from the get go, but I would argue that friends and community are very different things. Friends are the people who show up when they’re in town. Community is who shows up regardless of who’s in town.

Recently, while reaffirming my love for this place, I revisited the list of what I was looking for in a home—the list that guided me here:

Not rainy or consistently windy
Notable access to the arts
Remote and challenging to get to/close neighbors
Wild West influenced architecture
Progressive community
Exceptional trail access out the front door
High-speed internet
In our budget
Has to “feel right”

If you’re looking to move, locally or across the globe, I recommend creating a list like this — not necessarily of the style architecture you like (unless like me you have a thing for that), but of what’s important to you. And there are two things I’d like to revisit on this list:

Remote and challenging to get to/close neighbors
Progressive community

Last week, in this piece by

Haley Nahman

, a reader of hers asks for advice around building community, citing how exhausted she is attempting and failing to make plans over and over. Nahman rightly questions whether it’s actually community this person is looking for or just friends. I won’t spoil Nahman’s advice because I think her newsletter is worth paying for, but it did coincide with a conversation Ben and I keep having, which is:

What is more important? Friends or community?

For this season of my life, the choice was clear. When we lived in LA, we had great friends, but we struggled to find community. It took seven years to cultivate the bare minimum of acknowledgments with neighbors on our street. Many of them lived there because they wanted privacy. They didn’t want connection.

Once, we heard two neighbors fighting outside. A new renter was filming some sort of motivational video at dawn, and the old-timer was bellowing at him for disrupting his sleep. “This is Topanga!” he yelled. “It means don’t come here!”

While that is notably not what Topanga means, it is how our neighborhood often felt.

I like a crazy neighbor, but I was looking for a different flavor. I was looking for the people who wanted to live in a challenging, remote place, but were willing to look out for each other, were dare I say happy to look out for each other! I wanted a community. I didn’t say anything about making friends because I had always found that friends could come with effort practically anywhere. I made friends in jail for christ’s sake — I could make friends in a mountain town. What I had not experienced since the BVI was a community.

I was catching up with a friend who lives in New Mexico recently about our efforts to make friends where we live. It was (no surprise) slow going. We had found people we liked, and even a couple of those “you get it!” connections, but becoming real, life-long friends took enormous effort. Something that softened the blow for both of us, though, was community.

There is an oft-cited study challenging commuters to speak to one another on the train to see if it’s as horrible as they’re imagining it to be. We’ve all read the results: the commuters were happier when they made conversation. And we are happy here because we do the same. We wave from the kitchen window, we pull over to chat to people walking, we let out dogs and feed cats and check if the oven is on. We shovel their driveways and dig out their cars and water their plants because they do the same for us.

And yeah, it’s much easier to build a community when you’re hemmed into a high-alpine valley with wild weather and only a couple hundred people. It’s easier because you can look around and be like, “there it is, my community.” And even when you disagree with people or find their flood lights annoying, they are your neighbors and they’re going to be your neighbors for a long time. It’s like having siblings in other houses. You can rampage all you want but you still have to sit next to each other at dinner.

That said, being neighbors does not a community make. You can live next door to someone for years and have a better relationship with their trash cans than with them. But making community, or some sense of community, is at least easier than making friends because you don’t have to rely on anyone else to do it. You show up to the same coffee place. You join a class at the library. You could even go to a local government meeting! And then, you introduce yourself.

Here, I’ll give you some scripts:

“Hey, I’m Kelton. I live [in 7A, over there, behind you]. I keep seeing you around and meaning to introduce myself. What’s your name?”
“Hey, I’m Kelton. Have you taken a class here before?”
“Thanks for the coffee… what’s your name? Feel like I should know it by now.”

Is it a little uncomfortable? I mean, sure! Sometimes! But I personally find it more uncomfortable to get weirder and weirder about not knowing each other. Repeat their name in your head, make a little rhyme or write it in a Note so you remember, and the next time you see them, acknowledge them by their name and quickly offer yours again.

We are social animals, even the introverts. As much as I love talking to the pets at the party, I would love even more if someone joined me and was like, “I too seek out an emotional support animal when it feels like I’ve never had a conversation before and everyone can tell.” But that’s a friend, and that takes time.

What softens the blow, when I am lonely, is that I can walk outside and someone will say hi. There is always someone here to say hi. That—that feeling of being even barely known, but that if you needed it, there are people to check on your house, to check on your pets, to check on you—it is a buoy in the minefield of making friends. It is community. And in the loneliest season of my life, it is something I can sustain.