Good Neighbors
Editor’s Note: Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is an inspiring voice for the connection to place, care of the Earth, and loving relationships with humans and all beings. Her recent book, Mother, Creature, Kin, captivated me as soon as I opened it up. Having moved several times in her life, and having felt displaced, she inspires me to look to children, who know so easily how to connect to the place where they are by picking up sticks and cones and spiders. Here, she asks us to think about neighborhood, and what that word means. – Liz Thompson
This spring, I returned home for the first time in seven years.
It’s interesting how that word, “home,” can take on a multiplicity of meanings as we move through different phases of life. Many of us collect homes along the way, like we collect family mementos and treasures and then box them in the attic, their meaning preserved but out of sight.
There is the home where I was born: Omaha, Nebraska. The home where I lived from ages 1 to 3: on Sandhills Prairie in Western Nebraska, a place that lives like legend in family stories. The home where I live now: Central Vermont.
The place I returned to in the spring is the one that still holds for me the truest definition of home: Norman, Oklahoma. We moved to Norman when I was 3 and I stayed until I was 24, at which point I moved to New England for graduate school and then remained there for a job, and then for some adventure, and then for love, marriage, a child.
Visits to Oklahoma became fewer and farther between after my immediate family also moved away, until somehow the better part of a decade went by and I began to have recurring dreams of my childhood neighborhood, waking with an ache in my chest. It was time to go back.
I brought my husband and our daughter there for the first time. My mom and brother came, too. I thought it would be a joyful week of reunions and new meetings of friends’ babies. It was these things. But it was something else, too. Something that shook my understanding of that word, home.
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We moved to Vermont from Maine exactly one year ago this week. This Green Mountain State had beckoned to us since our short stint in a small town north of where we now live, almost nine years ago. My husband and I both desired to be in a (very) small community, set in a rural place. We’d looked around New England on and off over the years, never finding anything that seemed like quite the right fit. And then we came to see this house, with the old beams along the ceiling etched with the original axe marks; with the brook running alongside the backyard; with a five-minute walk in one direction to the library in town and a five-minute walk in the other to miles and miles of trails winding into woods. This was it.
Photo © Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
As boxes were unpacked and green things placed into the garden, we started meeting the neighbors. I’m bad with names, so every time someone introduced themselves, I’d run inside afterwards and scribble their names and relevant details on a piece of paper I’d left under a magnet on our fridge. Liz and Bruce with the collie. Chris and Jen in the green house. The women with the dog named Ben (Alas, I’d only caught the name of their pet).
Every time I move, I come into a more subtle understanding of the phases of relocating, of just how long it takes to feel settled somewhere, and the internal feeling of disorientation—of swaying wildly from side to side as if on a boat in a stormy sea—to ease. (And this move, to be clear, was a choice and a privilege. We made this move voluntarily, with the means to do so.)
As we neared nine months in this house, I was proud of the progress we’d made. We were settling in well. Things were starting to feel familiar.
Until the trip to Oklahoma.
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We landed in Oklahoma City late and arrived at the house of dear friends in Norman who had waited up for us with smiles and hugs that were so familiar that I felt the etymology of the word “familiar” in my bones before I later looked it up: “of a family footing.”
I lay in the guest room a few minutes later and burst into tears. I was home. This was home. Something tight between my shoulder blades that I hadn’t even known was there suddenly relaxed, and I realized that it had been tense for the seven years I’d been gone. For all those years of moving and searching, relocating and reaching for belonging, this home had been here, waiting for me to return.
“It’s interesting how that word, “home,” can take on a multiplicity of meanings as we move through different phases of life. ”
The neighborhood our family had lived in for more than 20 years was largely the same. Our initials were still preserved from when they repaved the sidewalk. We ran into many of our old neighbors: Diane—“I finally painted my house!” she told us; Bob, owner of the neighborhood deli who greeted us there like we’d never left; our first house, the one with the juniper tree and the patch of dirt beneath it where our feet, apparently permanently, scraped away all the grass as we rode our tire swing. (The new occupants have placed a large flower pot there to cover the bare spot.)
Being in this neighborhood, a whole wordless vocabulary of recognition spelled itself out in my mind. Memories overlaid memories, stories bled into stories, spurred by familiar scents and sights.
What is it about our childhood homes that finds its way into our marrow? That fuses us forever into a particular landscape and place? That leaves us with a depth of recognition that is akin to looking at ourselves in a mirror?
And what is it to leave those places behind?
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I returned to Vermont somewhat sobered and more than a little heartbroken. I was not wavering in our decision to live here, but my expectations of what it would mean for this place to be home had shifted. This will likely never be home to me in the way that Oklahoma is home. Belonging will not simply wash over and into me the way it did when I was a child, and I didn’t need to work at it because it simply was.
Photo © Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
No, belonging here will be active. Participatory. It will require attention and work. I will have to consciously build it from the ground up.
This felt daunting. But I noticed, too, a twinge of excitement. Being conscious of the process of creating a home has its perks. As an adult who is working toward a deeper ecological understanding of place, working to practice an ethics of inclusive community, and working to learn what it means to inhabit and share places responsibly—making a home presented an opportunity to cultivate relationships with more thought and attention.
“Every time I move, I come into a more subtle understanding of the phases of relocating, of just how long it takes to feel settled somewhere”
In particular, as a new resident here, I am determined to practice a more inclusive and thoughtful definition of “neighbor.”
In her book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Camille Dungy writes about this word as she tends to the human and nonhuman beings around her:
“But who is my neighbor? Bob and Pam next door, yes. Also the neighbors with the trampoline… Spin the globe. Pick a place—what of the people there? What about the rabbits, or the wandering house cat who threatens them when he stalks in our yard? Birds and beetles? All birds? All beetles? Even those classified as invasive? What about the prairie dogs who stand outside their burrows and chirp to each other and, when I bike past their carefully constructed colonies, seem also to chirp to me?” (p. 175)
I am exploring these questions, too. Who is my neighbor? What happens if I extend that word to include both Liz and Bruce—who just yesterday delivered a tray of flowers transplanted from their garden to help me fill out the new bed around our mailbox—but also the brook who is a tributary of the White River and who nourishes a community of plants and insects and fish; and also the black-capped chickadees who taunt our indoor cats; and also the earthworms and the cedar tree?
“No, belonging here will be active. Participatory. It will require attention and work. I will have to consciously build it from the ground up.”
Learning what it means to be a good neighbor here is one of the ways I am apprenticing to this place. It is one of the ways that I am learning to see, to listen, to notice. In the spring, I worked to learn the names of the spring ephemerals, those early wildflowers who come in before the forest canopy closes. Coltsfoot. Trout lily. Spring beauty. Yesterday, I heard a barred owl call in those same woods, the canopy now dense with green.
Our vegetable garden is currently feeding a family of woodchucks more than it is feeding us. We are pulling invasive wild chervil from the edges of the yard, but not quickly enough. The knotweed along the brook is creeping toward the lilacs. Forget-me-nots volunteered in the front flower bed, greeting us with their bobbing, cheery blue heads. We joined a CSA. I am working (slowly) on getting my prescribed fire certification to help with local land restoration.
Photo © Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
Now, just as I scribbled the names of our human neighbors in our early days here, I find myself scribbling down the names of creatures and plants I am meeting, whose names I am trying to learn, whose faces and voices I hope to recognize.
“I want to stay open to surprise, to stay open to lives that look and act in radically different ways than I am used to or comfortable with,” writes Dungy.
I want this, too.
I don’t know if I will ever feel that bone-deep childhood-home belonging here, but I also know that belonging, like home, can have different meanings for us at different points in our lives. Belonging, in this place, means, in part, the practice of being a good neighbor. It brings with it a sense of purpose, agency, and above all, reciprocity.
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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a song circle with a close friend. When we parted ways at dusk, we could smell the black locust trees in bloom. The peepers were singing their peeping chorus.
She looked at me in delighted surprise.
“We’re so lucky, aren’t we?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, we are.”
Photo © Ian Maclellan
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Mother, Creature, Kin (2025). She grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma. After receiving her Master of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, her writing became focused on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. From 2017–2022, she worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Her writing can also be found in The Atlantic, The Common, The Slowdown, Decor Maine, Crannóg Magazine, EcoTheo Review, From the Ground Up, CooNoor&Co, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Rochester, Vermont. Substack: The Entwinement. Instagram: @chelseasteinauerscudder