The ruts down by the river are gone. Last year, there were tracks along the banks left by my 12-year-old neighbor boy from his ATV. He’d make a wide circle, cutting through two of my other neighbor’s yards, then inevitably ending up on our property, which always had the deepest gashes. The neighbor boy and the ATV deeply impressed my son, who informed me that when I died, he was going to buy himself an ATV.

This boy appeared like a stray dog, sometimes in a pack of kids with bikes, sometimes pedaling alone on the winding roads of our strange, quirky neighborhood. He’d always nod to us, serious face, his blond hair flopping over his eyes.

I never yelled at him about the ruts but my husband put the fear of God into him and his friends one day after this tight pack of boys decided to turn our little swath of riverbank into their after-school club house, littering it with candy wrappers and Coke bottles. “You wouldn’t do this in your own homes, would you?” my husband hollered. Maybe they would.

An only child, my neighbor boy took to the streets because there was nothing at home. His mom was working or sick, his dad yelling or gone somewhere up the road without him. I don’t know the details of this boy’s life, but he had a sweetness about him that compelled my son to hug him on sight.

I’m writing about this boy as if he’s dead, but he’s not; he’s just gone. The sick mom left the yelling dad and took my neighbor boy with her. It’s turning into a nasty divorce, so the gossip goes. I hear that the boy is acting out in school, where he was a good student before. “He doesn’t stand a chance,” said another neighbor who’s close to the boy’s father. We’re only getting one side of the story. I’m sure the other side is a doozy.

Now I keep expecting to see my neighbor boy riding slowly down the road, or burning toward me in an ATV. He’s standing just outside my peripheral vision, the place where dead pets go.

I lost another neighbor boy a long time ago, another blond with hair in his eyes. He used to reach over the fence and pet my dog. One day he was showing his friends his dad’s gun collection and somehow this show-and-tell turned into Russian roulette and somehow he shot himself in the head. That night I wanted to make his family some supper but the only thing I had in the cupboard was spaghetti and that looked too much like what was on their wall so I went out and bought sandwiches instead. After that his little sister turned into a stray dog and spent most of her time in my backyard, away from that living room where it happened. Her mom would hang over my fence and watch the girl playing with my dog and cat, wishing she would come back home. The mom was lost, too.

So here’s where I’m supposed to say something pithy or profound about neighbors coming in and out of our lives, but I don’t have any good words for this. Just a lingering sadness — my emotional muscles that carry loss seem to atrophy with age.

Used to be when friends or neighbors went out of my life, I wouldn’t think about it much. But now I feel it deep in the bones.