Last month the topic for the church writing group was, “Neighbors.” I take my task of writing for this group seriously — kind of seriously, almost serious … anyway here is what I read at group this month:

When the topic of neighbors was first mentioned, I thought that it would be an easy thing to write about.  Turns out my brain just doesn’t really want to cooperate and write something easy and entertaining.  I have tried a few approaches but so far none of what I’ve thought of seems worth the effort to write about.

A favorite thing I like to do with single word topics is to simply look up the etymology and find something entertaining.  Turns out “neighbor” is a dead boring word.  It traces back through Middle and Old English to a Porto-Germanic root word meaning, near.  In Old English, “Nigh,” as in near, next to or almost.

I had hoped that neighbor might be associated with the word “neigh,” you know the sound a horse makes.  Sadly it’s not.  I’m disappointed, seriously disappointed.  Just think of the fun you could have comparing neighbors to horses.  Tons of jokes there, but sadly, multiple sources clearly state that neigh and neighbor have nothing in common other than a similar sound.  The dictionaries and etymological sources are quite clear, “Neighbor” is related to the word “nigh,” and even make impressive references to high and low German plus a few references to Dutch just for fun.

“Nigh,” is an interesting word, although a bit archaic.  If you look at the usage graph … yes, they publish usage graphs for words and you can see how often a word is used in a given year.  I want to know who makes those graphs and if they get paid for it.  Anyway, “nigh” reached its hight of usage in the 1850’s likely with farmers saying things like, “Nigh on 23 years ago,” and “Eternity is nigh.”  These days you don’t hear the word much unless you’re looking up the words to Taps or something.

You know Taps, the little song they play at night in a Army or Boy Scout camp?  The same tune they play on a bugle at a military funeral.  Yes, it has words.  Not many people know that and few have ever even sung them, but there are official, unofficial words that you can just look up.  I should mention that all sources for the lyrics for Taps say clearly that there are no officially sanctioned words for the tune and offer a few versions.  I did once read in a Boy Scout manual a set of words for Taps and I still remember some of them.  They start with the lines, “Day is done, gone is the sun / From the hills, from the lake, from the skies / All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.”

Likely, I’m one of maybe ten Boy Scouts who ever read that and one of two who still remember it.  I do have to say that the phrase “God is nigh” is both comforting and terrifying.  Comforting in the spiritual sense that God is always near for comfort, prayer, protection and so on.  Terrifying in that you meet God when you’re dead so God being near might not be something you want.

So after looking into the word, “neighbor,” I decided not to write about its origins or anything clever about the meaning of the word.  It’s just a boring word meaning someone living close to you.  While not specifically mentioned in the dictionaries, it generally doesn’t include family members, just the strangers who live near by.

Neighbor is also used in a few churchy things, as in, “love your neighbor as yourself,” but then I thought why would a church writing group want to hear about something from the Bible.  

Then I thought I might just do a bunch of neighbor jokes.  There’s a million of those, like, “My neighbor was yelling and banging on my door at 3 am.  Good thing I was still up playing my drums.” or the ever favorite, “If I’m reading their lips correctly through my telescope, my neighbors are talking about some creepy guy who lives next door.”

Yeah, let’s not do that.

Or I could tell you stories about the people I’ve lived next to.  Like Nick, who lived next to my childhood home when I was a teen.  He was a grocery store clerk and would sometimes stop by to share dented cans that his boss told him to get rid of.  Then there was the time he cut down three pine trees on his property.  They were near the property line and the roots were starting to lift the fence.  They weren’t that tall, maybe 15, 20 feet, and a couple of feet thick.  Instead of hiring a tree service, Nick got out a bow saw and got to work.  It took him a week or so.  Each day he’d come home from the grocery store and spend an hour sawing away.  In the end, he ended up cutting them at about five feet off the ground and decided not to try and remove the stumps.  Instead he got some lumber and built a little roof over the three stumps, hung a bird feeder and couple of bird houses.  The birds liked his work, but sadly after about six years the stumps rotted out and one morning the whole thing crashed through the fence and into our yard.  Nick rebuilt the fence, which lasted long enough for me to graduate tech school and father to sell the house before it collapsed.

Nick was a fun guy.  Once he came over and asked to borrow an axe.  I told him that I had a dull one with a lose handle and that I thought he’d be better off just buying a new one at the hardware store.  My description didn’t deter him and he said it was just to quickly split some firewood so I got it and he went off happily.  Over the next few days there was the clear sound of woodchopping coming from his yard and about a week later he returned the axe.  At first I told him that’s not my axe as the one he was holding had a new handle and looked like it had been sharpened. He explained that he’d broken my axe handle so he bought a new one and that a new knife sharing service had opened near the hardware store so he’d gotten it sharpened.

Likely he spent more on fixing my axe than just buying a new one for himself.  Years later, father told me that when he was packing up the house to sell, he found the axe and gave it to Nick as a farewell gift.

I guess I could just write a bunch of neighbor stories, but now I’ve wasted all my writing time trying to figure out what to write so that will just have to wait till next time.