Editor's Note: This is an experiment. Watch an essay unfold before your very eyes. I'll be writing this during the next few months, tweaking it, trying to make sense out of some minor facet of life and put it into words. Come back and see how I'm doing. Or just give me a little more time and wait to see the finished product. The choice is yours.

I'm not sure Robert Frost had it right in his poem ''Mending Wall,'' when he spoke of how good fences make good neighbors. It is true that I have a fence around my yard, designed not to keep the neighbors out, but to keep the dogs in. And it is also true that good fences make ideal leaning posts while engrossed in conversations about the local rat population, the car that just went through the stop sign, or how nice someone's yard is coming along.

But I am finding, nine years into my stay here in Providence's Armory District, that what makes for good neighbors is something else: The sense that we here in this gritty little urban neighborhood, like others of our ilk in thousands of other little communes of the city elsewhere, are somehow all in this together. We just haven't figured out what ''this'' is yet.

It wasn't the people that attracted me at first, however, it was the houses, the aging Victorians and triple-deckers, many of them painted with rainbow-colored palettes, lining the streets, bumping up against each in a casually formal way. Some lawns were tended; others, left to their own devices, had become so overgrown that for years on neighborhood clean-up day we were pulling car parts from the dirt. (There is still a rumor that one contingent actually uncovered an entire Chevrolet beneath the weeds, a story oft told during the impromptu summer cookouts we always seem to be dashing off to nowadays.) So the houses first caught my eye. But the neighbors made me to stay.

We are an avant garde lot, teachers and bankers and dancers and urban planners and painters, even a budding young massage therapist -- Mark. Ned, across the street, works as a groundskeeper for a local prep school, but is more often found under the hood of a car, where his true talents lie. He once replaced the entire wiring harness on my 1964 Mercury, carefully connecting every single wire in the car. When he was done, everything worked except the cigarette lighter, which I didn't need, and the clock, which had stopped working long ago anyway.

Peter and Tom live around the corner in an old funeral home, and claim never to have seen a ghost. Mice, though, are common. Dan and Kristen, across the street from them, are fixing up there own house while dan, who does construction, has been hired to help Virginia and Glen fix up their house. The day they moved it from one lot to another early this year had us all out in our yards, and the bricks that now line my garden came from thier old foundation. As you can tell, we like to share.

My neighbor Carrie, who lives down the street with her husband Paul in the old house they are still restoring three years after moving in, put it best: ''This place is so open,'' she once said of our neighborhood. ''It's like a college dorm. Everybody knows everybody.'' It reminds me in more ways than one of Brentwood, the subdivision in Raleigh where I grew up in the 60s and 70s, where turning up Carolyn Drive is always an exercise in nostalgia. How could it not be?

Mom's been in the house where I grew up since 1964. Mr. and Mrs. Wiggins _ yes, I'm 38, but that's who they'll always be to me _ are next door, right where they've been since '64. Mrs. Pearce is on the other side of Mom's house, in the same spot since the summer of '66. The Hawleys are across the street -- I can still see Mrs. Hawley carting me and Connie and Karen and Lynn off to school on rainy days in the family's 1970 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon -- and Mrs. Lyons, who babysat me when I was 7, is just down the street. (She lives just beyond the telephone pole Dad marked off for me to run to while trying to earn a merit badge in Boy Scouts. An overweight kid with an aversion to sports, I hated the running. But I did, just barely, get the badge.)

Now tell me, in 1998, when moving has become a way of life in America and no one seems to stand still for very long, how many people have stayed put in one place that long?