Neighbors

Brigitte passed away last week ‘after a long illness,’ as they say. Leaving behind Bruno, two daughters and a granddaughter.

The daughters and the grand left for home yesterday, so now Bruno is alone in his house. Alone with her clothes and toiletries. Alone with the dishes and gardening tools they used together. Alone with the car they drove to church together each Sunday morning.

Mostly, alone with the memories they shared and of which he will now be sole caretaker.

They met in Germany during the time of Hitler and fled to this country to make their lives, he as an engineer for Boeing, she as mother and wife and matriarch.

Their offspring had moved away, landing in Oregon – far enough but still within reach of a day trip. The elders maintained a vacation house near the Washington shore which they hadn’t visited so often of late as she became increasingly ill.

He kept bees and she her garden, two halves of a whole. They enjoyed our annual Christmas light extravaganza; Brigitte really enjoyed one particular piece, so we always placed it facing her kitchen window.

I built a custom entertainment center for them once, to his wildly over-engineered drawings. The thing weighed a ton and moving it from my garage shop to his living room was a neighborhood project. In payment, he gave me a wonderfully figured, richly colored board of walnut for which I’ve yet to find the perfect use. When we had the van with the misbehaving tail light switch, he would notice during his nightly rounds and call so we could turn it off and thus avoid a dead battery in the morning. I gave him some of my cut up dead-fall wood for his stove from time to time.

We lived across the street for (twenty-four?) years and we were comfortable with but not especially attuned to the rhythms of each other’s lives. We were good neighbors, if good means mostly respecting privacy.

This is pretty much all we know about Bruno and Brigitte. They were the neighborhood watchdogs who did not care for being watched, themselves.

And now, she’s gone and his life is so changed while ours goes on pretty much as before.