Welcome to the Neighborhood

I sank down in my canvas camp chair at the end of the driveway, our new home—our first house—looming behind me. A folding table with snacks and drinks sat a few feet away. What if no one shows? Upstate New York was quite different from my native South Africa. Maybe people thought it was strange for us to throw our own welcome party. I stared at the two sloping sections of the corn hole game I’d set up. The whole thing suddenly felt embarrassing. How long should I sit here, I wondered, before packing up?

The idea had come to me the day we moved in, literally as we turned down our new street a month earlier, in June 2021. With each basketball hoop and swing set we passed, my excitement grew. Families! I could picture us all hanging out together. At last, a real community, something I’d been searching for since moving to