Coffee, Cul-de-Sacs & Common Ground

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and Airpods

A cool September morning, a cup of instant coffee, some noisy birds, and apparently a school bus I didn't even know had a reason to come through my neighborhood sent me wandering down memory lane.

In this episode, I take a morning walk around the neighborhood I've called home since 2006 and think about how much—and how little—has changed over the past twenty years. I talk about raising and homeschooling our three kids, watching two of them head off to the West Coast, and hoping the creative one still at home eventually becomes one of those artsy people who actually strikes it rich.

Somehow that leads to air fryers, a missing Amazon delivery, a conversation with a delivery driver whose explanation made absolutely no sense, grocery pickup, mosquitoes that apparently didn't get the memo that it's getting cooler, and the strange little routines that make up everyday life.

But the morning also gets me thinking about something deeper: community and isolation. When we moved from the country into a suburban neighborhood, I imagined we'd eventually know the people around us—the kind of place where neighbors talked, helped each other out, had cookouts, and occasionally wandered across the street just to shoot the shit. Twenty years later, I know the names of maybe four families in a neighborhood of roughly twenty houses.

That gets me thinking about politics, religion, and just how divided we've become. My family has always been a little different from most of the people around us here in South Georgia, but I've also had conversations with people who see the world very differently from me and discovered that sometimes, when people actually talk to each other instead of shouting at each other, there's still a little common ground to be found.

As I watch the morning get brighter and wait unsuccessfully for a flock of geese to land on the pond, I realize there's a certain irony to all of it. I grew up in the country feeling fairly isolated. When we moved here, I thought suburban life might be different. Twenty years later, I'm still pretty isolated—only now I have much faster Internet.

It's a rambling morning walk through family, neighbors, politics, Amazon logistics, working from home, running a business, getting older, and wondering where everything goes from here.

Basically, it's another page from The Book of Donovan.

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