Betsy ☦️

When I was a child we had neighbors whose daughter was a good few years older than me. Old enough to be dating. And her boyfriend would come by and they would spend entire afternoons talking, her at the window, him standing outside it, for hours, just talking, laughing, knowing. I could see them from my bedroom window, and I remember it vividly, it stuck with me for some reason, but my parents thought this was hilarious, “how old fashioned, how unnecessary, what a strange thing to make the poor boy stand there like that”, they would exclaim. But my parents were wrong, and the neighbors, turns out, were right. That girl married that boy. They are still together. Living right next door to that house where they spend hours knowing each other. I, on the other hand, was raised with considerably more modern sensibilities and considerably less supervision, went on to collect a long list of broken hearts. There is something almost unbearably sad about that when I sit with it. The wisdom was right there. Literally next door, an arms reach away, and my parents were too busy laughing at it to ever try and understand it. The neighbors weren’t punishing that boy, they instead were protecting the most important thing in that house — their daughter.