Short Essay — Neighbours in wilderness

neighbour
[ ney-ber ]
noun
a person or thing that is near another.

I’ve been born one year before the Fall of the Iron Curtain. My parents moved from a humble village in Transylvania to a relative close’ big city ‘. They did it in a time when young couples got apartments from the Communist State in exchange for their assiduous work and humble life. So I have been raised in apartment blocks. Not the fancy ones, the communist ones. People were packed in concrete blocks of usually four-five floors. So naturally, I had a lot of neighbours.

I was fortunate enough to also spend my summer holidays at my grandparents that were still living in the village from where my parents escaped. They had fewer neighbours, one on each side. My grandfather was considering neighbours at least 10–20 houses away from us. And his ‘neighbouring love’ was so big that during the Football World Cup, he was rooting for the closest country geographically to ours. He used to say: “they are neighbours, you shoot root for them”. I was always perplexed because I never learnt about those neighbours in my secondary school geography lessons.

At that time, the summers seemed too long, and I was craving the big city life and the beginning of September, which meant that I will be brought back to my parents. Oh, how I would change that life with this adult one if I could…

Now, I leave in another country, in an apartment of a house that was separated into 5 apartments. It’s quite not the same feeling as living in a communist block. And although I am technically living in a village, it doesn’t quite feel that way. It’s more of a city feeling minus the business and crowdedness of it. It’s a win in my book. I can’t complain.

Read the full story at Phytosopher.com

Phytosophy is an anthology of thought experiments that explore the intrinsic human condition through the lenses of the plants.
Are plants courageous, lazy, or humble? Do they procrastinate, cheat or sacrifice? What lessons can we learn from the nature in order to make our lives more meaningful?