Catching Up

Living in Minnesota, one sees a lot of one's neigbors in the spring, summer, and fall, and hardly at all in the winter. We have one family up the block and across the street from us with a daughter who's about a year younger than M. They saw each other several times a week, just by chance. And then winter smote the land, and some time around Christmas I ran into the mom at the grocery store and learned that she'd given birth to her second child two months before.

The other night was maybe the second or third evening in 2008 that the temperature got above 70, so everyone in the neighborhood was out and about, or at least out in their yards. We stopped by the neighbors' house to give them an old toy that M. doesn't use any more, and actually got a good look at the baby for the first time. We'd seen him a couple of times in the past, but never really saw anything but his eyes peering out from a round bundle.

The revelation, however, was the older daughter, who apparently spent the winter learning to talk. It was almost like coming back to a new school year and being amazed at the changes in people you haven't seen all summer, only in reverse. Is this what it's like to live in Austrailia?

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