Driveway Conversations

Posted on October 5, 2026 Updated on October 4, 2026

When my sister and I were teenagers growing up in Honolulu, Hawaii, our next door neighbor, Pammy, was our very best friend. She was a couple years older than us, she went to a different high school, and her family dynamics were different from ours, but we were very close.

The three of us had hours’ long conversations sitting at the end of our driveway. The asphalt driveway wasn’t uncomfortable at all; rather, it comfortably supported our friendship for years. Our conversations varied but we never ran out of topics to discuss, and you can be sure that boys figured into those teenage talks from time to time.

I still have driveway conversations with my neighbors in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. Sometimes those conversations look more like glancing over the fence, seeing a neighbor, and chatting with them to get caught up with our households’ lives. Another “driveway conversation” may look like someone stopping at the front of our house while my husband and I are doing yard work, and us neighbors asking about each household’s latest travels, accomplishments, or illnesses. After all, my husband and I, and many of our neighbors, are in the 50-80 year old age group.

Connection is what counts and that connection extends to monitoring each others’ homes while travels are taking place, taking care of the neighbors’ garbage bins during said travels, or intervening when a vicious dog attacks our very closest neighbors’ dogs. And when that vicious dog is noted as being on the loose, texting each nearby neighbor to make them aware of the danger. (Yes, that happened within the past couple weeks.) But in order to have the neighbors’ contact information we have to care enough to befriend the neighbors and share our primary contact details with them.

All of us have experienced pandemic-imposed isolation so we are intimately aware of how uncomfortable that disconnect can be. Remembering that discomfort, I can’t help but make driveway friends, supermarket checker friends, restaurant server friends (the latter two types being Glimmer Friendships) wherever I go. Won’t you join me?