Neighborhood street party builds community

I recently took part in my favorite neighborhood tradition: our August street party. It’s a lovely afternoon of stuffing my face with barbecue and visiting with my neighbors. You see, on my little dead-end street in west Olympia, we don’t just live next door to each other. We work at being neighborly.

Walter is the convener, organizer, mover and shaker of our annual shindig. Every community needs its heart, and Walter is ours. Some time in June, he will call on us to gather on his patio to set the day and plan the menu.

We know Suzy will make her killer potato salad, and Judy will bring the carrot cake with the frosting you want to swim in, I’ll make my Cheater Beans, and Andy and Laura will add the margarita machine. Nothing builds community better than a margarita machine.

We know the men in the neighborhood will come together the evening before the party to drag Walter’s massive grill out to the street. For years they moved it with just their brute force. Then Jim, our mechanical genius, designed a motorized pulley for the thing. Gotta love these guys.

A few hours before the party starts, the men will gather around the grill with cold beers and conversation. Each will take his turn with the spatula, turning burgers and chicken and Walter’s fabulous ribs soaked in his super-secret marinade.

Together, on the morning of party day, we raise canopies and set out assorted patio furniture in front of my house. By noon, neighbors arrive from our little street and the houses beyond, bearing side dishes.

We are usually joined by an assortment of extended family and friends. So over the years, we have come to know more deeply not only our next-door neighbors, but each other’s brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren.

The street party has become our time to try new things: This year, Aaron introduced those of us who were willing to Pickle Backs. That’s a shot of rye whiskey with a pickle juice chaser. It tasted way better than it sounds.

It has become our time to compete: Though I didn’t come close to winning the watermelon seed spitting contest (Walter took that with a 23-foot stunner), I did register a respectable 14-foot mark. Far better than last year, when the seeds pretty much landed on my shoe. I got out of the water balloon toss dry. My partner/husband, not so much.

And as dusk sets in, the whole thing wraps up in a poker game that goes on into the night.

While we pack a lot of fun and a lot of food into our street parties, the payoff for us all is a deeper, unspoken connection to each other. The shared experience of planning together, cooking together, eating together, playing together for this one day ripples across our relationships throughout the year.

The winter of 2012, when the “snowpocalypse” hit with piles of snow and power outages, a remarkable thing happened on my street. Minutes after our homes went dark, my neighbors all went outside and gathered in the very spot we hold our August party. We immediately divided the labor: Start digging out our driveways and cars. Check on Walt and Suzy, the eldest among us, and clear their walk and stairs. Those with four-wheel drive vehicles will venture to the store with our combined grocery lists.

We didn’t really wonder what we should do. We hardly even planned. We just did. I think because we were so used to doing … together.

You buy that kind of trust with Pickle Backs and watermelon seeds. You forge that kind of friendship in front of hot grills with cold beers.

Those were my thoughts last weekend at the end of our 12th street party. I was about to close my front curtains for the night and turn in, but I stopped to look out into the dark. There, on my front yard, I saw my neighbors, my friends, crowded around the table playing poker.

Their faces were basked in the glow of the worklight that Jim jury-rigged to my umbrella. Their laughter followed me down the hall to bed.

This story was originally published August 30, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Neighborhood street party builds community."