Threaded with care

Finding, nurturing, and understanding community

“Am I going crazy or was that an earthquake?” I texted my neighbor after feeling an unusual tremor that rattled the house for seconds. “I was just going to ask you the same thing,” She wrote back immediately. Although we are both home most days and our houses are within shouting distance, we rarely see each other during the winter. Our kids play together off and on, we borrow and loan cups of sugar, and I give them eggs from our chickens when we have more than we can use. In the warmer seasons we wave to each other while gardening, compare squash vine borer horrors, and invite each other to parties or pizza nights.

I often think about community and connection with hope and longing. I dream of people that my little family can really feel comfortable spending time with, friends who might want to hang out with us as much as we do with them. I scroll through the important people in my mind, family, friends, neighbors, and notice the ways that we show up for each other and make each other’s lives a little better because we are there. I wonder a lot about what makes a community and I try to take tiny steps toward meaningful connections that work for our introverted and neurodivergent family.

At different times in my life, I have had the privilege of being part of groups of people in ways that felt supportive and meaningful. Conversations, hikes, drinks, meals, gatherings, chats during work, and being in the same place at the same time allowed clusters of relationships to solidify for a while and eventually melt away. After living in the same place for several years, I am learning what it might be like to build trusting relationships that grow over time instead of continually springing up and dying back when people move on.

Community can come together over shared values or proximity, but I think we can also create community by offering care. It is so easy for all of us to feel like we need to be self reliant, our own lawn mowers stored for that one day a week when we cut the grass. In her book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, Elissa Strauss points out that because we can access inexpensive stuff more easily than in the past, it is no longer essential of us to ask for help and rely on each other in contrast to what humans have done for most of our existence. We work to pay for the goods and services we need which means that acts of caring among neighbors and community members aren’t a priority.

It takes me a long time to feel comfortable in relationships. I care so much but I feel awkward and inept, so I try to make use of my strengths as someone who can do things. It feels like such a little thing, but I am always happy to bring a meal to friends who are tired, overwhelmed, and going through difficult times. I have learned that, let me know if there is anything I can do to help, doesn’t offer much to someone who’s brain and life are on overload. But, when can I bring you dinner, is usually welcomed and, I hope, helpful.

When we are cocooned in our single family homes surrounded by busy lives, it can be hard to open our schedules and worlds to other people. Offering help and asking for it can feel vulnerable and uncertain but both possibilities offer us opportunities to stretch and strengthen the tenuous webs of connection that make our lives better. When I remember how happy I am to share what I have, I feel like less of a burden when I ask for what I need.

During the early years of the pandemic, which for my family overlapped with having a kid who was struggling and didn’t want to leave the house, I felt more comfortable staying at home and often turned down invitations to go elsewhere, especially on cold dark winter evenings. As I have had more capacity, I have been able to say yes. Even though home is most comfortable for me, it feels really good to get out and spend time with others. I’ve come to believe that if I want people to invest in, connect with, and support me, I need to say yes to them more often, too.

I recently read this essay about a family who found a way to work around the challenge of scheduling time to get together with friends. Their answer was to invite people over for dinner every Saturday night of 2025. Reading this, of course, made me wonder if I should be more ambitious in my hosting. Making food for friends, even a large group, is always enjoyable and relatively easy for me, but I find it stressful to invite people, to put the event out there and wonder if anyone will want to come. Weekly doesn’t work for us, but we host backyard pizza nights many months out of the year. I host because it’s nice to have people who want to eat the food I make, because I want to share our space with people we care about, and because I hope that it is a chance to strengthen and grow our community. There are so many ways we can give to and show up for each other, whether going to the trouble to invite people over, or being the ones who say, yes, I want to be there.

I’ve often thought of community as cohesive group, knitted together with a clear pattern that keeps everyone connected. In practice, I find community from all the disparate people and places that I am connected to. The friend who hosts one of my kids while I take the other to an appointment. The librarian who grabs my books from the hold shelf before I even hand her my card. The homeschoolers who meet up with us for sledding and ice skating and swimming. Friends who come eat pizza with us and friends who want to meet up for walks. My neighbor who texts me after minor geological anomalies, my neighbor who looks after my chickens when I’m away, and the neighbors who visit our little free library. It isn’t perfectly stitched up, but rather a variety of colors and textures sewn into a haphazard pattern, but threaded with care.

Community is such a big topic with so many different challenges and possibilities. I’d love to hear how and where you find community or what you find hard about making connections, if you’d like to share.

Warmly,

Anna