Rowhouse ritual

I grew up in the leafy suburbs of the Midwest, where contact with the neighbors was limited to the occasional cross-yard wave from a car window before pulling into the garage.

The idea of sharing food with them on a weekly basis, let alone the infrequent celebration, would have been inconceivable. Block parties, I believed, were just a quaint relic of Americana from a Norman Rockwell painting.

And then we moved to rowhouse Philadelphia, where the kids frolic in the concrete "yard" of our street, the next-door neighbors are our great friends (a good thing, since I smell their meatballs cooking), and the 30-plus houses around us spontaneously combust in block parties seemingly every few weeks. Just name an event - Memorial Day, birthdays, crawfish season, the sudden arrival of cherry blossoms - and we're tapping a keg, firing up the grill, and unfolding tables to celebrate the moment.

We've become so good at eating together, in fact, that three families decided this year to take it to the next level: school nights.

Our Monday night "family meals" - in which each family takes a tri-weekly turn cooking for all three - began as a matter of convenience. We all had kids on the same swim team, and everyone had been arriving home famished at 6:30 with nothing yet begun on the stove. So why not divide the work and cook an easy, reheatable meal on Sunday to share Monday all around?

The debut dinner was a feast of Nana LaRosa's meatballs, an authentic Indianapolis-Sicilian recipe that Joe and Dawn have brought East (where thankfully it acquired a few more garlic cloves).

Duty-bound to protect the honor of family gravy, our neighbors on the other side, Melissa and Doug, then turned out meatballs true to Granny Spinelli's recipe from Sicilian Bucks County.

I'm not getting in the middle of this one - I loved them both! - but each typified the spirit of these meals, a true sharing of family traditions as much as an unspoken (but friendly) competition.

And quickly, after a dozen meals, what began as a Swim Night necessity has become an anticipated ritual on its own, not to mention a subtle bonding between friends that only home-cooked meals can forge. (Swim season ended last week, but we plan on continuing the rotation until summer.)