Yesterday, my old friend Cort came to visit. He was a groomsman at my wedding; he got me the job that led to my career; during grad school we’d get together at his apartment in married student housing to turn potatoes into curry and watch our daughters laugh together on the playground in a shared courtyard outside. But those days don’t last. A little after graduation, he was reading the scriptures when the word Salem stood out to him with a surprising intensity: soon, with a little research and a lot of prayer, he and his family left Utah valley for that town’s namesake in Oregon to build a new life and home. After all, ours is not a time of gathering but of dispersal—Saints carried like seeds on the wind. And so it is that my friends and I raise our children and juggle our work in completely different landscapes, rarely finding the focus to talk or even text through the fog of all the promises we’ve made.
Ah, but yesterday Cort came by my house. Six of his seven kids were with him, plus my four made ten kids in the house. Or at least it did until our grad school friends Lesley and Tony, who recently moved back from Florida, arrived with their three. And one of the neighborhood kids wandered by, as neighborhood kids are wont to do, bringing the total to fourteen.
I hadn’t seen Cort in years, but it didn’t feel that way. He’s the kind of friend who can walk back in seamlessly, like you’re picking up an old conversation after a tangent. In our house’s layout, you step immediately into a living room that is divided off from the rest of the house by its own door. It’s a good space, hovering somewhere between the public and the private. We blew right through it. Cort is the kind of friend I could lead straight through that space into the kitchen, the house’s true heart. Without needing any particular invitation, he settled in at the kitchen table, while I stood at the count to make a tall pile of quesadillas for the kids, who had already split off in clumps to explore.
Our house is well-suited to hosting groups of children. From the kitchen, we could keep half on eye (or at least an ear) on most of the places designed to attract them. In the hallway from the living room, there’s a little play kitchen, set there as a magnet to keep toddlers close. Past that is the girls’ room, with its assortment of books, dolls, and crafts. On the other side of the kitchen, through a back door, is a sun room the previous owners built onto the house, now stocked with Legos. Inside the sun room door, some stairs lead down to a hall that connects the boys’ room, arranged to leave plenty of play space open, and the playroom proper. Like the living room above it, the playroom has a door, which is perfect for keeping it just within yelling distance while minimizing the amount of ambient noise that carries up the stairs. The only traditional kids’ spaces you can’t yell to from the kitchen are outdoors: the back deck, which is pretty easy to see to but blessedly hard to hear from, and the front yard swing, which we installed during our Covid year as an enjoyable place for contained escape.
Prepping lunch took long enough for the kids to settle in. As they figured out where to play and who to play with, the stream of questions for their dad slowed to a trickle. By the time the food was ready, we were ready to leave our spot in the house’s Grand Central Station. We set up a picnic for the self-sufficient kids on the back deck. Meanwhile, the adults and the one-year-old made our way back to the living room, closing the door to keep the little one in and the encourage the others to return to their games and conversations in the rest of the house after lunch. The door isn’t intimidating. It was easy enough for them to drift through when they needed an answer, or to show off something, or to soak in the reassurance of a parent’s presence. It’s just enough, though, that it felt like we had some space and time of our own.
The Doctrine & Covenants teaches that the same sociality that exists here extends into the world to come, that we weave tapestries on earth which will shine with celestial glory. Yesterday afternoon, coming up from the business of life for a breath of fresh air with old friends, I believe it. In that space, children passing in and out like quantum particles, the bonds of friendship transcend time. Cort’s youngest falls asleep on my shoulder and I am at once a young father again and a glimpse of the grandfather I hope to become. Lesley and Tony’s autistic daughter plays happily with our same-aged son, not once coming back to nudge her parents toward home, and we remember how they were babies and toddlers together, how she was his first friend.
I get sentimental now remembering it. Not what we said so much. I am a man who loves words, but the poetry here is in the proximities between bodies.
It feels like the layout of the house helped this all happen. We’d have been happy to see each other anywhere, but it seems like there’s a specific magic, as our families expand, to being in a place where we can be close without all being on top of each other. It’s hard for me to imagine having the same experience with fourteen children in a tiny apartment, and harder still to imagine it in some sort of Beauty and the Beast mansion where you can get lost wandering around the west wing. It feels like there’s something to all the little distinct-yet-linked spaces this house offers, where another generation can make memories together as they play here, talk there in shifting sets of combinations. If heaven is a tapestry of relationships, a house can be God’s loom.
Here on earth, in brick and wood and human motion, we are weaving tiny pieces of a heavenly city of God.
I am not as convinced that this house, which I love, is designed right to build up a physical Zion on earth.
I am sitting in my living room now, looking out the front window into the leaves of two shade trees, and feeling a little ungrateful and even treacherous as I make that admission. I don’t know if a house takes on any kind of spiritual life of its own that would allow it to feel dismissed or betrayed, but it’s hard not to think of it sometimes like a living thing. This is the house, after all, where another friend’s grandmother once lived. They’ve told us about the little offerings of blood her sons left in the storeroom while roughhousing. Every Memorial Day, our friends take peonies from the garden to lay on her grave. Does a house notice that? Does it remember the loves it has nourished before? Surely, it’s greedy to ask a house for much more than such a sense of soul.
But the Restoration has taught me a certain greed. A wild ambition for a city whose sociality pours out beyond the gentle partitions of a home’s doors. And in building such a city, my house has real limitations.
To be sure, we do all right with neighbors. When the fourteen kids that gathered here yesterday poured down the street, we could reassure their parents they didn’t have to worry. Children can be a great social lubricant, and they’d brought the block together. The next-door house, we said, was where the kid we nicknamed Christopher Robin lives. The retired couple in the house after that had given us an inflatable pool after their grandkids grew up and love hearing the laughter float out over two fences to their back yard. The third house has the young couple with the dachshund the kids liked to pet, and the house after that was where the extended family from Mexico just arrived, with a yard full of kids of their own.
But the sphere of love our house fosters barely reaches beyond there. Our friends around the corner feel just a little too far for spontaneous visits. We only met the neighbors behind our house when they worried over how the hedge between our houses had become overgrown. And we barely know the rotating cast of characters across the street at all: they happen to live in a different ward and somehow that feels like a different world.
At least part of the blame for that goes to our house’s design. Or rather, our lot’s. Our area was developed in the postwar years, when each house was built with a driveway for its own car. That single choice changed the basic logic of a neighborhood, distancing us from one another. Add in laundry machines and television sets and the inside of each house became more and more a self-contained unit, less in conversation with the homes, shops, and resources around it. We don’t share a well or a marketplace, don’t gather wood from the same forest or stop in to pray at the same holy places by the roadsides. Though we live alongside each other, I see few of my neighbors while shopping and none at work. There’s a park nearby, but we rarely use it at the same time. Even after years, the faces I see there are mostly strangers, often having come by car for one reason or another and ready to leave again to their own corners of the town or valley.
With the exception of the church meetinghouse, I miss the kind of distinct-but-linked places where my neighbors and I might make memories together. And even the church has its limitations: we see each other or sacrament meetings, classes, and youth activities, maybe at a blood drive or a service project. But we don’t really use it for firesides anymore, let alone for an impromptu activity night. Since the change to two-hour church, I don’t even talk with people in the foyer quite like I used to. It’s just not the space for sociality it could be.
And so I’m left in a house that nurtures gathering within a neighborhood that does not. I don’t mind. I know that having neighbors who see each other once a week and don’t mind kids in each other’s yards is a wonderful thing, and a privilege fewer and fewer people today enjoy.
But I don’t believe this is the Zion we were called to build just yet. Not until we find new ways to weave our communities together. Not until even the streets we stroll down sing Holiness to the Lord.
James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature. He is a co-founder of the Mormon Lit Lab and currently serves on the board of the Association for Mormon Letters and on the advisory board for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. His most recent novel is The Bollywood Lovers’ Club. Further information on his writing is available at goldbergish.com.
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