A bowl of tomatoes

Neighbor trauma, my awkwardness + a cookie recipe

I didn’t think much of the doorbell ringing that rainy afternoon, nor of my son calling me downstairs because “someone wanted to talk.” It must be an Amazon delivery person needing my signature for something, I told myself. 

But when Wyatt stage-whispered, “I think it’s the neighbor,” my blood ran cold. 

The thing is, I have neighbor trauma. I guess it comes with the territory; odds are high you’ll get some bad neighbors if you’ve lived in more than twenty different homes in your adult life, as I have since marrying Matt—not including long-term temporary stays. Here are a few Hall of Famers.

1: Our second year of marriage, the guys who stood under the steps whenever I wore skirts so they could look up and make catcalls and comments. They may have also been running a meth lab.

2: In Spain, the American military officer next door (in base housing, no less!) who screamed at me because my daughter said she didn’t want to play with his daughter on the kindergarten playground. (Maybe not her finest hour, but she was five!!!! If you have spent any time on an elementary school playground, you know this happens about thirty-seven times per recess). 

3: Our downstairs neighbor in Busan who sent management up to speak to us because I dared to let my kids run around our apartment during the icy cold Korean winter. 

4: In Seoul, our downstairs neighbor came up to yell at me because I threw Mabel’s rubber ball at 7 pm on a Saturday, and she didn’t like the sound of it bouncing. (Relevant or not, she was from New York City.)

I could go on, but suffice to say, there was ample reason for my heart to freeze at my son’s words. I was even shaking a little as I opened the door and saw that it was indeed my neighbor, a man I had recently learned was named Friedrich. 

This Friedrich is the very man who gave us the kind of stare that’s set to ominous music in horror movies the first time we looked at our house, but who later watched and laughed with us the time I had to I shove Lilly onto the roof of the patio when we locked ourselves out of the house. I should have taken that opportunity to make a friendly gesture. Last Christmas, when my eldest daughter Jayna was home from grad school, she made so many cookies, you’d think she was auditioning to be a Keebler elf. She planned to take them to these seemingly affable neighbors. But another neighbor had told me that this particular couple spoke absolutely no English, and my German was “nicht gut.”

Furthermore, we had read in multiple places that Germans don’t really like to be bothered and would think we were weird if we just showed up at the door, even if we had cookies. Maintaining peace from a distance, according to sources, was best. I had also heard and read several horror stories from other Americans here about their German neighbors, like police being called when kids played in their own yards, legal battles over made-up damage, and fights over parking spots. One friend told me her neighbors were nice, but they had come over to complain when a door slammed. This made me almost cower in fear. Do you know how many doors slam in my house (not necessarily out of anger, but we have so many windows and if they’re open, doors slam) (but also sometimes anger because this is a big feelings house)?!?

Older photographic evidence of some big feelings.

 All this to say, I was content with friendly exchanges of waves and the occasional “hallo.” If they didn’t hate me, well, as the Germans say, “Alles gut.” So we ate way more Christmas cookies than is advisable, and from the haze of my near sugar coma, I wondered if the people who wrote those articles were wrong.

One day early in spring, Wyatt and Annalee came up to me looking stricken, each nudging the other toward me until they simultaneously blurted out, “Mom! It was an accident! We kicked our soccer ball into the neighbor’s yard!!” 

Oh. No!!!! 

Our neighbors, like most Germans, have an impeccable garden that they work on year round. There’s also all kinds of expensive-looking irrigation equipment and fancy sculptures. My mind immediately went to the worst places, that the ball had hit and broken something, and that we’d have to deal with the legal ramifications. But after doing some reconnaissance from Lilly’s upstairs bedroom window, we saw the ball resting in a mercifully benign spot, albeit on the other side of the fence. I sent the kids over to explain the situation, apologize profusely, appear their most adorable and forgivable, and then ask for the ball to be returned. 

But as luck would have it, the neighbors weren’t home. So I wrote a note that started with “Es tut mir leid…” (I’m sorry) and then went on to explain that meine kinder had kicked their fußball into the yard. It closed with what hopefully said, “Please know I will do my best to ensure it will never happen again,” but might possibly have been, “Your face looks like a donkey’s butt.” There’s always that chance when you use Google Translate, trust me.

An example of Google Translate at its finest: the settings on our bidet when we lived in Korea. Thanks but I don’t want turtle towels, enjoyable forests, or Joe if I’m pressing these buttons.

 Anyway, when I was in the backyard a few hours later, I saw my neighbor and tried to repeat what I had written. 

“Fußball? Ja,” he said, casually chucking the errant ball back over the fence. "Kein Problem," he added with a dismissive wave. 

Those were the first real words we ever spoke to each other, and while this again should have bolstered my friendliness, they were all we said for a long time.

Months later, at the end of summer, I was in my cobbler era, inspired by the blackberry bushes crowding the many hiking trails in the woods near our house. As I scooped out servings for my family from my latest creation, I heard—or maybe it would be more aptly described as felt at a reverberating soul-level, “Take this to your neighbor.”

It took just a fraction of a second for my brain to begin arguing, pointing out the myriad reasons why I shouldn’t, not the least of which was the language barrier. My German has improved but still eludes me under duress. The argument was pointless, though. I knew in my deepest core it was time for me to do this, and I wouldn’t be able to rest unless I obeyed.

I placed a generous serving in a paper bowl and turned to go when I heard-felt the words, “There are two of them.” So I got out another paper bowl into which I placed another generous serving, and then I carried my gift over to the neighbors. It felt like The Odyssey instead of a couple dozen easy steps. I rang the doorbell, took a deep breath, and held it. The wife answered the door. She looked surprised… then confused… then surprised again before offering me a timid, encouraging smile.

“Guten Abend." I smiled, but my voice was shaky. “Ich backe.” And here, my brain froze. This was wrong. What was the past tense for “bake”? Everything was melting down, alarms going off in my head. “Uhhh…. Kuchen….Schwartzbeeren…" I thrust the bowls forward. 

Fortunately, that said enough, and the neighbor smiled. She called her husband to the door, and he also smiled. They took the bowls in their hands, and the woman said, “Oh! Warm!” which (bless!) is the same word in German and English. 

As it dawned on me that I really hadn’t said anything to them, besides being sorry about meine kinder and their fußball, I said, “Ich heiße Joy.” This was when I discovered that my neighbors’ names were Friedrich and Claudia. They told me sorry, but they couldn’t speak English. Then Claudia said something to Friedrich to which he replied, “Ja!” and disappeared. She wanted to give me something—a zucchini. I insisted it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted she really wanted to, and then Friedrich appeared with the most gigantic zucchini I’d ever seen. She said she had three of them, which was more than they could eat all by themselves. I left with “vielen danke,” (many thanks), and a huge smile on my face. 

But now, a week later, Friedrich was at my door. All I could think was, What have we done? 

I opened the door, and his usually serious face broke into a broad smile. My heart started beating again. He had a glass bowl full of gorgeous red tomatoes.

After an awkward pause as I considered what I could do in return, I remembered some cookies I had made for Annalee’s teacher the time I took her birthday cupcakes to her class. The teacher has celiac disease, and Annalee felt sad for him because he could never eat the cupcakes brought in for student birthdays. She insisted we take something for him, and lucky for all of us, I had just seen a Facebook post about amazing gluten-free cookies someone had taken for a school bake sale. I whipped them up and discovered they were scrumptious. The only problem was that while they don’t have gluten, they do have peanut butter. So as I stood at my front door, smiling awkwardly, I wondered if Friedrich had a peanut allergy. 

My family has been using Duolingo to study languages since the beginning of 2019, and while it really has helped us so much, especially since moving here, I’ve learned that the order of material being taught doesn’t always make sense. For instance, one of the early sentences in the French course is, “Je mange une orange,” or, “I am eating an orange.” We joked that anyone learning French should carry around an orange whenever visiting France so as to impress the locals with their fluency. 

Lucky for me, though, Duolingo had prepared me for precisely this moment in a health unit I completed about a month earlier. But since I don’t want anyone getting the wrong ideas about my abilities to “sprache Deutsche,” though, let’s take a birdseye glance at this scene, as translated to English. 

Friedrich: Hello!

Joy: Oh hello! Welcome! 

Friedrich: I brought you tomatoes.

Joy: Wow! Beautiful! Thanks so much!

Friedrich: *smiles*

Joy: *smiles* (pause… pause…) Do you have a nut allergy? Peanut allergy?

Friedrich: (surprised [of course]) Me? *points to chest then shakes head vigorously* (concern spreads across his face as he wonders just how far this health inquisition will go)

Joy: I want cookies for you bake. Chocolate. And peanuts. Good?

Friedrich: *nods, though slightly confused. Am I baking the cookies? he wonders, panicking a little. Or is she baking them for me? I’d better get out of here!* See you later!

Joy: Yes, see you later! 

I’m sure you’re not surprised to learn that things didn’t go much better when I took the cookies over a few days later. 

Joy: I bake! Cookies. Chocolate. Peanut butter. 

After this Neanderthal monologue, I stood awkwardly for a moment, then shoved the cookies into their hands and hurried away as fast as I could, saying, “Have a good day!”

And then, weirdly, I didn’t see them for two weeks. They were home, but I just… didn’t see them. Typically we wave to each other at least once a day, so this was unnerving. What if it turned out they were, in fact, very allergic to peanut butter, and they had just never eaten it before, and I had brought maybe not a pox upon their house but a veritable health catastrophe? Almost as terrifying: what if they hated the cookies so much that they were hiding from me, lest I bring over another baked good that made them want to puke? I could just picture them in their garden, hearing my sliding glass door open and hissing, “Crap! Here she comes!” before dropping to the ground and belly crawling behind one of their sculptures where they hid until I’d gone back inside. 

My discomfort as I waited to see them again forced me to think hard about the whole exchange—why it happened, and what I might have hoped to get out of it. The honest truth was, I couldn’t answer except to say that it was something I felt I absolutely had to do. Why? Was it really just because I believe it’s what I was told to do?  

Umm… well… yes. I don’t know how else to explain it. In that long stretch of silence, I realized I truly hadn’t expected to receive anything in return. I mainly just hoped they wouldn’t chase me away. So why did I do it? 

A couple months ago, I re-watched one of my favorite movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and it struck me that we share a rare form of intimacy with our neighbors. There is so much they don’t know about you. And yet, they’re the ones who hear when you yell at your kids, when your dog is being obnoxious, when someone is shouting for more toilet paper from the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes they catch glimpses of you in your backyard, wiping tears off your face, or hear the argument you have with your husband. Then as they pass on their evening walk, they see him wrap his arms around you in the kitchen and kiss the back of your neck. 

I think this is what makes Jesus’ seemingly simple  command to “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” one of the hardest things to actually do. It’s uncomfortable because in many ways, this closeness without the bond of truly knowing you gives a distorted view, like a funhouse mirror.

I know this command extends beyond literally the people who live next door. And I also believe that sometimes loving your neighbor means striving for a peaceful detente, the sort of equilibrium achieved by buying only soft toys for your dog or spending hours nearly hypothermic at the playground so that your kids don’t have quite so much energy to burn inside your high rise apartment.

Sometimes though? Maybe it requires more. For the once-bitten-twice-shy with neighbor trauma like me, the walk to their front door went against everything I thought I wanted. But receiving friendliness and warmth in spite of my abundant awkwardness—in spite of all they knew after a full year of living in close proximity—felt both extravagant and necessary.

Finally, on one ordinary Thursday morning as I was driving out of the neighborhood, I saw Friedrich and Claudia  again. Before I even recognized them, they were smiling and waving enthusiastically. Their body language, albeit through the window of my car, told me we were one step past “neighbors” and closer to “kind of friends.”

As all the worried knots inside me loosened, I realized that even though I hadn’t intended it that way, maybe the act of taking baked goods to my neighbors wasn’t just to practice being gracious toward them but also a chance to discover they could be gracious to me. And maybe, especially right now, we could all use more of that.

Since I know you’ll ask, here’s the cookie recipe. It was in the comments of a Facebook post on a popular page, so I don’t think the poster will mind my sharing.

Super Delicious Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup sugar (plus about 1/4 cup for rolling)

1 cup peanut butter

1 egg

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat to 350*F/ 175*C. Mix sugar, baking powder, vanilla, and egg well. Then add peanut butter and mix well. Stir in chocolate chips. Use melon baller or heaping tablespoon to scoop evenly. Roll smooth, then into the extra sugar. Make a cross hatch on the top with a fork and bake for 10 minutes. Allow to cool for 5 or so minutes before removing from pan as they are very soft at first. Enjoy!