The Tale of an Introverted Street

Ridgecliff Avenue bears a large difference from the average college community. For starters, everyone’s windows are usually dark by 10:00pm, with mine sticking out like a sore thumb. At nighttime, when I’d drive through the small road to our garage, it almost feels like a ghost town when you compare it to the college campus lifestyle, where you would hear screaming and yelling voices when you are trying to just get some sleep.

I tend to sleep in, but the people in my neighborhood rarely do. A lot of them have dogs, and are often up early walking them. People are very friendly when I eventually wake up and once again drive on the small road in order to complete my tasks on campus.

This atmosphere is not a new one. I’ve been alive for twenty years, and lived on this street for eighteen of them. People have moved in and out, but there were several “regulars,” as I liked to call them. There are our direct neighbors, Mike and Lynn. We’ve known them since we had moved in, and my first distinct memory involving them was when we went to celebrate their son, Mark’s, high school graduation when I was six. They were very lovely people, and so were our other regulars. The other two definite regulars that I remember is a man that is often (and by often, I would say 90% of the time) either on the sidewalk or on the lawn waving hello. It does not matter whether I am walking with my family, or driving my car. He is consistently there without fail, no matter what mode of transport is being used.

Yet I still don’t know his name.

I still don’t know most names, besides Mike and Lynn, and Libby, the sweet lawyer who lives two houses away, and the Hurst family who lived across from us. I was close with the Hurst kids when I was a child, but we grew apart over time. We grew apart with most people in the neighborhood, and sometimes it truly felt like a neighborhood of those friendly acquaintances that are always there to say hello, but there are no true deep bonds possessed.

Everyone keeps to themselves, yet there is an overwhelming feeling of safety that I get by living here that I certainly do not get on a boisterous college campus. Here on Ridgecliff Avenue everyone is welcoming, and the atmosphere is quiet and relaxing.

I wouldn’t trade my quiet, beloved, introverted neighborhood for the world.