I lived next door to wonderful neighbors for 20 years but didn’t have them to dinner until one week after I moved away. Just another example of not appreciating what is irreplaceable until it is gone.

There’s a saying that we can’t choose our families, but we can choose our friends. In this way families are like neighbors, but they can become our friends through fate rather than choice.

My location on my old block was often envied, especially by women who needed to coax their spouses into outdoor chores. I lived next to Bruce and Sherri – and they took care of me, and my yard.

True to Ballard architectural “style,” the old block had great variance. My 1905 house was on a 25-foot wide lot, nestled between other two houses from the 1950’s. My kitchen window looked straight into Bruce and Sherri’s hallway; my back door aligned exactly with their kitchen window. For 20+ years they were there for me (literally and figuratively) day and night.

After Bruce retired from the Coast Guard he stayed on as a civilian, working nights. As a salon owner, Sherri worked days. Their overlap was just two days a week, but I got to have them both all seven.

When my daughter was born their daughter Amanda brought me a note offering childcare, “Call any time.” I kept that on the refrigerator until long after she had graduated from high school, probably until she was married and expecting a child herself. I always expected to be able to still look out the side window and see her playing with her dolls in the grass side yard that I took as my own backyard entrance.

If there was a knock on the front door on a Monday it was often Sherri. “It’s your neighbor,” she’d call from the other side. Over the years I opened the door to her bearing a microwave, baked apples, clothes, shoes, the occasional empty measuring cup. Bruce was more likely to announce himself by squirting the hose on my kitchen window or leaving cut roses from their bushes on the back deck. I borrowed almost every one of his tools, but I don’t think he ever borrowed anything from me. It was a one way relationship in which I had to accept receiving rather than giving.

Bruce mowed my lawn, wrapped my pipes; always spotted the nail in my car tire before I had a clue. He was the one to knock with warm banana bread or brownies just out of the oven (no nuts, per my request). To several other households on the street with children he was the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin. He was the one to cut up my dead plum tree within minutes of it hitting the ground. Once he cleaned the engine of my car when I was out of town, after he’d replaced the battery.

If he was on days, then Sherri was nights. Seeing her outside in her bathrobe with the dog or the flicker of the television in her bedroom, I knew that I could call her any time. If there was trouble, and for a while on our street there was trouble, her front door was where people went for help. When my daughter got hold of scissors and cut off all her hair, I called Sherri and rushed her to her salon as though she was a dentist who could restore the broken baby tooth if I got her there soon enough.

Separately the neighbors were powerhouses and together they were beyond formidable, cars always washed, lawn always edged. Their trash cans never lingered on the street; their pumpkins never rotted on the front steps. Together they tackled my holly tree one 4th of July before breakfast and Bruce had it chopped, loaded in his truck and en route to the transfer station less then three hours after they spotted me with too small loppers.

How could I ever leave such neighbors? Neighbors who could always drive in the snow, fetch groceries when I was sick, appear bearing gifts I didn’t know I needed? When I went to college, I didn’t even realize I wouldn’t live at home again. I’ve never left home before.

Throughout the fall, with the For Sale sign in front of my house, Sherri would keep raking with attitude and say, “I’m in denial.” A few days before the move she sat in my kitchen and we both cried. “Even if I didn’t see you,” she said. “I always knew you were there.”

“You had my back,” I told her.

We were never the kind of neighbors to do things together, other than neighborhood events. I can’t think of a time that Bruce ever even sat down in my home – not counting the time he lay on my kitchen floor to fix the disgusting leak beneath my sink.

But I left home and moved away from Bruce and Sherri after 20 years. That’s when I realized it was time to have them to dinner. On New Year’s Day we sat down in our new house for the first time, sharing ham and potatoes. We have been finding our way to a new relationship since then.

Bruce stops by with pictures of the new granddaughter. I make sure to walk by the old block on Mondays when Sherri might be home. Fate gave us the opportunity to become friends now we have to create new ways to connect without our windows 10 feet apart.

I’m sure that I miss them more than they miss me, especially when one of my car tires looked flat. Martin told me I should take it to Les Schwab. “Bruce would show me the nail first,” I said accusingly (and then continued to drive on it).

The day before Valentine’s Day I could see the top of Bruce’s head in the window of my new door. He thrust a long thin Ballard Blossom box towards me, proof that we are still part of his extended nest. Then we went outside to look at my tire. He found the nail in two seconds flat.

Peggy Sturdivant is a freelance writer.