The Where I Live series aims to showcase our diverse city and region by spotlighting its many vibrant neighborhoods. Each week a local resident invites us over and lets us in on what makes their neighborhood special. Have we been to your neighborhood yet? Get in touch to share your story. If your story is selected and published, you will receive a $250 stipend.
It’s 2017, and we’re having dinner at the home of new parent friends who live in the neighborhood just north of Loop 410 between Blanco and Lockhill Selma roads. Our daughters go to the same day care and have been friends since they were 3 months old.
As we walk through their front yard under a grove of mature live oaks, we see a sign in the lawn of the house next door: Coming to market soon. My heart jumps.
“What’s the story with this house?” I ask. Turns out our friends know the family. We walk over and knock on the door. When they let us in, we see it’s in the middle of renovations.
We look past the disarray and the salmon pink bathroom tile. It’s exactly what we want.
When I reflect on the past six years here, my excitement wasn’t really about the house. It’s a 1,500-square-foot brick house built in 1961 with no grounded electricity and original windows. We love it, but it’s not gracing the pages of House Beautiful anytime soon.
It was the community and location. It was next-door neighbors with a child the same age. And, as we discovered later, a lot of other kids who all went to the zoned neighborhood school, Castle Hills Elementary in North East Independent School District.
It was hosting get-togethers in our large backyard, loaning and borrowing eggs and baking sheets, feeding each other’s pets and watching the kids run in and out of each other’s houses, making complicated blanket forts and weird potions out of things they found in the pantry.
It was the majestic oak trees reaching across the street to clasp hands. Beneath their canopy, I feel grounded and safe.
When the pandemic hit, I was more grateful than ever for our little community. When schools closed, we formed a homeschool co-op with the neighbors to see us through those first baffling, chaotic months. When everyone was healthy, we all let the kids play. They needed it.
We took long walks with a wagon full of books and dolls, stopping to read or play in the long ditch that cuts through the neighborhood.
As soon as the Barshop Jewish Community Center opened to facilitate online learning, we started a new pandemic chapter. The JCC became a godsend, not only for helping families during the pandemic but for the well-organized, month-long summer camps, group exercise classes and outdoor pool with a splash pad for kids.
During Winter Storm Uri in 2021, the kids bundled up and built snowmen and ate fresh-off-the-lawn sno-cones with cherry syrup. As the blackout dragged on, neighbors lent us water and a propane stove (which we have since stockpiled and purchased!).
After emerging from pandemic hibernation in 2022, we discovered delicious new dining options like Bilia Eatery and European Dumplings Cafe on Northwest Military, and Hula Poke on San Pedro.
H-E-B Alon Market has become like my own kitchen/pantry (thank you Cooking Connections for feeding me with samples) and Hardberger Park an extension of my backyard, where I take long, therapeutic walks with friends and make dozens of Freudian breakthroughs.
We feel rooted and supported here. We have real relationships with our neighbors and are grateful for the help they’ve offered in hard times. Even when emotions get complicated between the kids, I know it will eventually pass and we will find our way to connection again.
A few months ago (when the market was still hot), I got a flurry of calls from people (or companies?) wanting to buy our house. Hard pass. No matter what the tax assessor says, you can’t put a price on what we’ve got here.
