My Carrboro neighborhood has always been friendlier than many. Most everyone knows who lives in each house and we usually wave to each other as we drive in and out every day. Our newest HOA president has taken us into the 21st century, well, at least the 20th century, by setting up an email contact list. Amazing how much easier it is to schedule neighborhood get-togethers. Just because technology is part of my daily life at work has nothing to do with how I think about communicating with my neighbors. After all, this is the south. We knock on the door, borrow a cup of sugar and then share the fresh baked goodies that result.
I know which of my neighbors have children, which are retired and which ones have local businesses. I know who goes for a walk each evening but beyond that our lives are pretty separate. After all, nobody really wants their neighbors knowing everything.
Last week I was included in a group email from one neighbor, Grey Brown, responding with her suggestions to a neighborhood project scheduled for the coming weekend. I noticed a weblink in her email signature. It simply said www.greybrownpoetry.com. I clicked.
An hour later I had read every poem on her beautiful website. I now know she has published two books of poetry and I know that writing is, for her, intensely personal and the way she copes with adversity and regenerates her spirit. Her just published book of poetry, When They Tell Me, is about her experiences “raising a child on the autism spectrum.” There are selections from it on her website. I have no words.
From her website I also listened to a radio interview she did last month at our local radio station WCOM in Carrboro and another done on NPR’s State of Things. I now know that Grey works with the Duke Health Arts Network, “one of the first arts in health care programs in the nation…integrating the arts and humanities into a variety of health care settings…” integrating her poetry with medicine in a very unique way. What a fantastic project and I didn’t even know such a thing existed.
I now know how very talented my neighbor is and also how very strange it is that a simple web link at the bottom of an email can change the way I see my own world. If Grey Brown is behind the front door of her house, imagine who else might be behind the other doors in my neighborhood.
You can hear Grey read her poetry at the West End Poetry Festival on October 17, 7:15pm at the Carrboro Century Hall, 100 North Greensboro St, Carrboro, NC. See you there.
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