For Wilshire Baptist Church
“How many of you can walk into your neighbor’s house, get cookies out of their pantry, and then sit down at their table and eat them?”
That was a question Kristin Schell posed to participants at the annual Neighborhood Summit in Garland on Saturday. Schell is founder of the Turquoise Table movement that promotes community and neighborliness through the placement of iconic turquoise picnic tables in front yards.
Schell asked her question and nobody raised their hand, and of course she already knew why. “Fifty percent of Americans don’t know their neighbors. We don’t know each other anymore,” she said.
Anymore? That word hints that once upon a time we did know each other better than we do now. Schell grew up in Dallas and said she can still visualize the kitchen of her childhood home and of her neighbors’ houses, and she can still hear the slamming of doors as friends and neighbors came and went.
“Life had a different pace. We knew those neighbors we could count on,” she said.
Schell lives in Austin now, and a walk through her neighborhood five years ago brought the realization that she didn’t know her neighbors. “I was part of that 50 percent,” she said.
But then something interesting happened. She hosted a backyard barbecue for friends and didn’t have room inside so she ordered a couple of cheap picnic tables from Lowe’s. When the delivery driver left a table in her front yard, she had a thought: “What if I left a table there?” And then she wondered, “What would it look like to plant the seeds of presence in our neighborhood?”
So she painted the table turquoise, her favorite color, and within minutes a neighbor she’d never seen before stopped by and said she loved turquoise too.
“I couldn’t have lived closer and I had never seen her before,” said Schell.
Friends and strangers took notice of the table and word spread and the tables began to multiply and now there are thousands of turquoise tables in 50 states and 13 countries.
I’ve written about the turquoise tables in earlier blogs because, thanks to Wilshire and especially Tiffany Wright, we have one in our yard. But meeting the person who started the movement adds a layer of interest because she’s not just one of those goofy people from Austin who is living the mantra, “Keep Austin Weird.” As it turns out, she wasn’t intending to start a movement; she was just trying to bring back some of what makes being a neighbor not only enjoyable but vital.
It sounds like there was a good measure of nostalgia in her desire, but she hints at a higher purpose as well.
“I know from scripture that we are called to know our neighbors,” she said. “We were created to live in community.”
I know that instinctively, but still it can set me on edge. While LeAnn has the gift of hospitality and she shares it generously, I have the impediment of introversion and I can cling to it if allowed. So LeAnn will “set the table” for guests and I’ll follow her lead. But as it turns out, the turquois table sort of runs itself. Maybe because of the bright color, or because of the fact that it’s in the yard near the street, but people seem to notice it and come to it without much prompting. We’ve hosted some intentional events out there, but some of what we’ve done has been very low key and ad lib and that brings people too.
Most surprising is that we’ve had a neighbor tell us they’ve seen people sitting at our table when we’ve done nothing at all. Just sitting, or perhaps resting? From what, we don’t know: maybe a long walk, maybe a bad day?
That’s an interesting development, but we’ll need to be more watchful. Not in the “get off my yard!” kind of way but in the “what can we do for you?” kind of way. Because being a good neighbor and being community requires some real interaction.
As Schell said: “We live in the digital age and yet we have never been more lonely. I felt that loneliness. . . . There will never be an i-device that can take the place of eye contact.”