Back in early August, our community got together for food and talk at a ‘Community Night Out’ event. The idea is that you get to know your neighbors, and are therefore more aware of what is going on and what is out of place. It was a lot of fun.

We ended up walking home with two other couple. We stopped in front of our house and ended up talking for 1/2 hour, just chatting (gardening ideas, mostly). Wine came up at some point, and we all agreed that we should get together for a wine tasting.

When J. & I moved in to this neighborhood, we made a commitment to get to know our neighbors. We didn’t want to just wave hands, we wanted to have meals together, borrow and lend cups of sugar, basically re-creating a mythical time that people used to live in before we were born. So I didn’t want to leave this sentiment in the ether, that weekend I contacted them via email and asked *when* we’d hold our wine tasting.

The first time we were all available was last Friday, the 9th. But my ankle was jacked up from Muay Thai the day before and I was *not* in a socializing mood, so we cancelled. In the week following, we had a couple of email attempts at rescheduling, but it never gelled.

Or so we thought.

Friday night is ‘date night’ which generally means that we watch TV, or do a jigsaw puzzle, and cook dinner together. Sometimes we go out, but mostly it’s a chance for us to spend time together that isn’t work-related or somesuch. So there we are in sweats, putting together a (fiendishly difficult) jigsaw puzzle, the kitchen in a mess, generally disorder all downstairs . . . when the doorbell rings.

It seems that everyone had decided that we were just going to do it a week later, and J. & I had missed that.

What to do? We laughed and said ‘give us 10 minutes and ignore us tidying and we’re on!’

We did, and they did, and we had a GREAT time. The wine tasting was really just an excuse to get together and drink. We learned a lot about our neighbors, and they about us, and the cheese and crackers went over great. Nothing fancy, far less structured than my original plan, and probably a lot better for the casualness.

This is turning into a real neighborhood.