Just Another Tuesday

The homemade BBQ sauce has been simmering since two o'clock.

The smell wafts down the path between the houses — something with molasses, chipotles, a hit of vinegar that was sharp but has mellowed — and by four, three different women have wandered into the common house kitchen on the pretext of needing something else entirely. The cook isn't fooled. She hands each of them a spoon, watches their faces. “How’s it taste?” The woman who's been gardening all afternoon, still wearing her sun hat pauses, thinking. "It needs something." And so this summer’s good natured but entirely serious homemade BBQ Sauce Battle continues.

You're on your porch, a couple of tiny houses down from the common house, book in your lap. You look up with a smile and sincere question about how they are doing when your neighbors pass on the path. Most of them are carrying something toward the common house — a bowl, a platter with a dish towel draped over it, something wrapped and held carefully with both hands. They pause — they hadn’t wanted to take you away from your book — smile back at the invitation and take onto your porch to share what they’re bringing to the Tuesday shared dinner.

The art studio has been busy lately. By five-thirty, the folding table appears near the common house door, and by six, there are ten art pieces on it: watercolors, a small ceramic bowl, something in wire and glass that catches the light differently depending on where you’re standing, and a textile piece with intricate embroidery stitches that amaze everyone who picks it up. One woman — thirty years running operations for a company that made things she didn't care about — has made a small painting of her own front porch. She's standing slightly apart from her own work, looking at it from an angle she hadn’t seen yet, accepting warm compliments from her fellow artists organizing this week’s impromptu art show.

Dinner comes together the way it always does on Tuesdays — not exactly organized, but a slow congregation as days wind down. Side dishes arrive from every direction. Potato salad. Coleslaw. Tomatoes from the garden so ripe they barely need anything, sliced thick on a platter someone's grandmother would have recognized. The ribs come off the grill in two waves. The cook finally shares what's in the sauce. Half the table immediately starts suggesting adjustments. She absorbs this feedback warmly but will do nothing with it, confident in her creation.

The pie situation deserves its own accounting. Four of them. Rhubarb, peach, something involving blackberries and a great deal of confidence, and a brown sugar chess pie from the woman who grew up in Alabama. The slips of paper for this week’s bake-off go into a mason jar, stubby pencils in another. “Remember, only one vote per person, no cheating" someone says laughingly, gently elbowing the baker of the blackberry pie. The Alabama chess pie wins, which surprises no one except the women who voted for the blackberry, who good naturedly claim the vote was rigged (and are also wrong - the brown sugar chess pie was really good). The dishes get done the same way they always do — someone washes, someone dries, a third will put everything in its place.

Then Hit Me With Your Best Shot comes through the screen door, and something shifts. It starts with two women near the kitchen singing at each other in the way that means business, and then it's four women, and then someone's actually dancing, and no one is embarrassed because why would they be. Later it will be Joan Jett and at least six women will know every word and cannot explain why that song still does what it does but it does and it always will.

By the time the fire pit gets going, the string lights are already on. They're always on in summer. The fire takes just one try — by this time in the summer, everyone is well practiced though cone, log cabin and pyramid techniques all have their champions. The fireflies are out past the edge of the patio, doing their thing in the dark grass beyond the light.

This is when the day gets told. Not announced, not performed — just offered, the way you do when the fire's going and there's nowhere to be. A woman had a hard phone call this morning. Another finished something she'd been stuck on for weeks. One just had a good day and others share in her joy, as friends do.

The smoke from the fire pit drifts. The conversation does too — a thread about some movie, a debate about whether pie or crisp is the best use for rhubarb, a long comfortable silence that no one fills because no one needs to, just listening to the crackle of the fire.

By ten, most of the chairs are still full and the conversation has shifted to calling dibs on the leftover pie that will be at the coffee bar in the common house tomorrow morning.

Another evening flows easily into another day. The camaraderie is seamless, trustable, what we’ve all been looking for in this part of our lives. This is community at its best, and just another Tuesday.

Photo by Shane Dawson on Unsplash