One morning near our house in NoDa, a man looked at me and said, “You and your baby are gonna die,” but he didn’t give a date, so I carried on. Later, I saw a woman in a hat that read “Make Crawfish $1.97/Pound Again,” a political stance I can get behind. And one Dec. 24, a fellow down the street was blasting AC/DC’s “T.N.T.” when he raised a Bud Light and wished me a merry Christmas.
To a guy who grew up off a gravel road with no neighbors in sight, the city can be a lot. My childhood backyard sloped to a creek, and in autumn, we’d throw and shoot skeet off the hill. In winter, we’d race plastic sleds. In summer, we’d get so muddy in the creek, Mom made us shower before we jumped into our snazziest 1980s rural luxury—a 4-foot-deep, octagon-shaped, above-ground pool. On the rare occasion we heard a car coming down the road, my brother and I scurried behind the apple tree to hide.
This is to say that the quiet of Charlotte in spring 2020 was perversely comforting to me. The pandemic city was as silent as my childhood.
No more. The city is back, big and busy and bickering. My wife and I were part of the Pandemic Migration—we moved into a bigger space two neighborhoods over. Now, we have two young boys, and we can lose hours watching the city buzz by, drunks and runners, fire trucks and city buses. We have no backyard, in the traditional sense, at least not one suitable for clay pigeons.
We do, however, have a courtyard.
It isn’t much, a collection of grass and sidewalks connecting two rows of homes. But it became a critical common ground for this chapter of our lives—the have-two-kids-during-a-pandemic chapter. It’s where we’ve celebrated holidays and birthdays and found laughs after deaths and health scares.
Funny to look back now and remember: We thought we were fools for moving here.
Who packs up with an 8-month-old and a dog to leave a home with a fenced-in backyard to move into a shared-wall community in the heart of a young neighborhood during a pandemic?
This was fall 2020. I was 40 and dealing with, well, that. George had been born March 6 of that year, and we were sleepless in an east Charlotte home when COVID shut the city down the next week. We hardly noticed at first.
Eventually, we became a cliché, deciding we needed more indoor space in the work-from-home era. My wife, Laura, toured a townhome and loved it, and that was enough for me.
On Nov. 3, 2020, Election Day, we dropped George off for his first day of day care and put the old home on the market. We had a winning offer before the polls closed. A week or so later, the owner of the company where I worked told me he was selling.
All that change, all at once, opened windows for doubt to drift in.
What would our dog do without his rival squirrels? What if the new neighbors in that hip-looking NoDa community were, god forbid, actually hip? Did we really need to be around other people at all, parents or partiers? Shouldn’t we just buy a sports car with this midlife crisis?
Just before we handed over the keys a month later, we wrote a note inside the guest closet, above the door: “We brought our baby George home to this house, March 2020. A special home.” Laura cried as she drove away with the baby in the back seat.
From the elementary school lunch table to college orientation groups to pandemic Zoom trivia (hey, guys!), we need courtyards in this life.
There’s an unofficial order to ours, leaders and followers, busybodies and recluses, Gen Xers and Millennials and Zers and, with each season, more children. We’re bound by the same HOA, the same floor plans, and the same damn Solo Stove ads that infiltrate our Instagram feeds after a night of fire-pitting.
Two great Charlotte leaders and friends of mine, Michael Marsicano and Hugh McColl, often say that our city runs on reciprocity. I’ve been skeptical of that—every favor needs a returned favor?—but I think they mean this: You get something back from Charlotte when you put something into it.
Same is true of relationships. Around our fire pit, your value isn’t determined by job title. It’s whether you can make me laugh through the chaos of daily life, and whether I can do the same for you.
My calendar says I spend about 60 hours a month in meetings for my job. After day care drops and pickups, spit up and potty training, I give what I have left to friendships, but I’ve failed so many of them. It’s a conscious trade-off; the other night, George called me his best friend, and I’ll take that deal.
The courtyard, though, doesn’t ask for much. Just spontaneous hangouts. We’re in our fourth year here. Some folks have moved away. The ones who’ve replaced them are great, but now that we’re free of COVID restrictions, they have more to do than sit around in stretched-waistband pants and talk, like we did in 2020.
This may be my lasting social takeaway from the pandemic, or getting older in general: Relationships are dynamic. No courtyard is a frozen pond; no text group is everlasting. But good friends find us when we need them most, and vice versa, and maybe we should just be grateful for that.
I can still hear the quiet of my childhood, and I feel some regret that my own boys won’t know it.
But this city upbringing—chalk drawing on sidewalks, light rail rides—is fascinating, too. Not long after we moved in, we saw a little girl sitting on a blanket with birthday balloons in the courtyard. Millie was born 52 days before George. Her parents had the same 2020 fog: What, exactly, was this world we brought these babies into?
Soon, we sat them on a step together, and they grabbed each other’s noses. They’ve been stuck together ever since. On Friday nights, they trade applesauce and fruit snacks. When her parents need a break, Millie comes over for an hour. When we need one, they take George. Reciprocity.
I don’t know whether our kids will inherit the courtyard from us, or if we’ll all move away.
What I do know: Millie and George waddled together in the courtyard, then ran. Soon, they had matching scooters. Last year brought a battery-powered car, and they switched back and forth as driver and passenger, cruising the courtyard, owning the courtyard, the next generation of us, having found each other, at least for now, partially thanks to the pandemic, in this little space in this big city.
MICHAEL GRAFF, a former editor of this magazine, is the Southern bureau chief for Axios.
Michael Graff
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