College friends reunited in Durham, NC

DURHAM, NC—LNF MINIHOOD PROFILE 02

Reed and Eric are parents to four-year-old Milo, one-year-old Evie, and dog Sandy.

Mollie and Lauren are engaged and live with their dog, Luna, and their cat, George.

Reed and Mollie are friends from college. Eight years later, when Reed was pregnant with her first child, she and her husband Eric took a pandemic leap of faith to move near Mollie and Lauren. The two families live a 10-minute walk from each other in Durham, NC.

Minihood (noun): A group of friends or family who rent or buy homes within a 15-minute walk of each other

The following interview has been edited for clarity, but is in their own words.

What’s the origin story of how your minihood came about?

Reed: During the pandemic, Milo was about to be born and [my husband] Eric and I were terrified to have him in New York. We were living in an apartment with a dog, we didn’t have any family nearby. I knew that Mollie owned a home in Durham, and it was also geographically halfway between Eric’s family in Richmond and my family in South Carolina, so we thought, okay, that’s perfect.

Lauren: But an important part of the story is that I had only met Reed once or twice before she moved here, and I’d never met Eric!

Mollie: Even though [my now fiancée] Lauren didn’t even really know them yet, I knew we’d want to keep Reed and Eric close. I’m constantly scouring Zillow, and I found an amazing house a two-minute walk from us. So I was like, hey…this just popped up…if you want to be neighbors?

Lauren: Reed and Eric left probably two weeks later to give birth to Milo and left us with the keys to their new house. We spent a lot of that next year on their back porch in the evening, eating pizza, just the four of us and Milo.

At LiveNearFriends we call the person who rallies to make a minihood happen an instigator. Mollie, was that you?

Mollie: I’m definitely the instigator. I knew there was a risk of [Reed and Eric] going back to Richmond or them going to Greenville, because they’re both very family-oriented. By finding them a great house, it was our chance to keep them here. Everyone adores this neighborhood. It’s really fun, it’s eclectic, it’s not pretentious. You can walk downtown.

Tell us about your house, Reed and Eric. What made you decide to buy it?

Reed: It’s 2,400 square feet and ranch style. We love that everything’s on one floor. It has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, which means we have a guest room. We have a room that’s basically just windows, which was a huge selling point. And a big wall for a projector to watch movies.

The location is amazing. There’s a trail called Tobacco Trail that goes straight downtown. We rollerblade with the stroller and Milo loves it. It’s also walkable to our favorite coffee shop, Cocoa Cinnamon.

What about your current house, Mollie and Lauren? What made you decide to buy it?

Mollie: Our house is set back into the woods, so you feel like you're on vacation when you're there. It’s 1,200 square feet, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Tons of beautiful outdoor space, with palm trees, magnolias, and all sorts of native plants. It’s very unique, this close to city limits.

One of the big reasons why we love it, aside from the home itself and the property, was that we can still just walk along one beautiful street, or through the park, to get to Reed and Eric’s.

Lauren: Mollie and I were heading to meet Eric, Reed, and Milo for brunch one Saturday morning, and as we’re driving our realtor honks his horn at us and says, “I just saw a house. I know you’re not in the market, but it’s everything you’d want.” So I said, okay, send us the address.

We get to brunch and tell them, and Reed says, “There’s an open house? We're going right now!” Thank God we did, and that Reed has such vision, because we fell in love with it. We got there at 11:40am, the showing was ending at noon, and the best-and-final offer was at 1:00pm. So we put an offer in, Mollie took a cold shower, I was doing nervous push-ups–and I’ve never done a push-up in my life–and we got the call an hour later that we got the house!

Did anything surprise you about living in a minihood together?

Mollie: We're just in it together. Obviously we have our separate lives which we love, but we support each other. Nothing is transactional. We don’t Venmo each other. It’s not like, “Oh we’re going to take care of their kids because one day they’re going to take care of ours.” We don’t even know if we’re going to have kids.

Lauren: Reed and Eric have been this unbelievable example of what life could look like. They’re cool, young, awesome parents who are taking it all in stride and still have their own lives. I think it’s important to have people to look up to in your life. And also, being around Milo has made me more confident in my ability to parent, and watching Mollie with the kids too. It’s showing us that we don’t have to be scared about what that would look like.

Eric: It's so ironic that you all see us as role models because we feel that we truly couldn't do it without you.

Talk a little about the relationship Mollie & Lauren have developed with Reed & Eric’s kids.

Eric: You two were the first friends to meet our children, maybe three or four days after each of them were born. You set up welcome home decorations in our house, and assembled furniture while we were in the hospital. So you've certainly been there every step of the way.

Lauren: The level of closeness [that Mollie and I have with Milo] is kind of indescribable. We have a closeness with Evie too, but she’s still so little.

We've made it a priority to carve out special time so he can be a kid with us outside of our relationship with his parents. We take him out to breakfast. We took him to the John Deere store and told him it was the Tractor Museum (laughs)...that was a long time ago, but he still talks about it every day.

Reed and Mollie both are out of town a lot for work, so sometimes Eric and I end up–we're not co parenting or anything–but we take care of the kids, we hang out. Eric and I have this system of him removing the car seat and putting it in my car, and then I remove the car seat and leave it in the driveway.

And it goes both ways. When we were renovating our house, we slept in their guest suite in the basement for like two weeks. Once our power went out, and we slept over again, and Reed was like, “Don’t go! I want the power to go out again.”

Do you have any favorite rituals or routines as a crew?

Reed: Eric likes to play piano late into the night, so I like to let him sleep in on Sundays. It became this ritual where I would pack up the kids while he was still sleeping and walk over to Mollie and Lauren's house. They’d make me coffee and we’d all hang out, and then later Eric or Lauren would pick up bagels to bring over.

Reed: One morning, back when I had a newborn and a toddler and I was exhausted, Mollie and Lauren kept telling me I should take a bath and that they would watch the kids. And I was like no, no, no...but Lauren went into their bathroom and just set it up for me. That first time, when I lay back in the hot water, it felt like surrender. I’d been going, going, going, and then suddenly I had this moment to myself. I remember Carole King was playing on the record player. I felt so taken care of.

Eric: Now Reed takes baths over there all the time. And Mollie and Lauren would always say I should too, but I’d always say that I was okay. But I want to point out that Reed never actually got rose petals, but the one time I decided to take a bath… I got rose petals (laughs).

What advice do you have for people thinking about living near their friends?

Mollie: Obviously any big choice you make can feel hard and different and scary, but sometimes you just have to live your life as if everything is an opportunity. And sometimes life gives you opportunities to change things up.

Reed: Yeah, we had plenty of people and some family in Brooklyn, but it was 2020 and I was eight months pregnant! So we decide to take a risk, pack up the U-Haul, and head to North Carolina. It was pretty impulsive, but it was without a doubt the right decision!

Lauren: I think that you can choose to live near friends and then also let your relationship develop at the speed that you feel comfortable with. We didn’t start with extreme closeness–we have built this over years. Relationships take time. Sacrifice is a part of it, because people are like, I want to live in this place, no I want to live in that place. But in the end I don’t care what city I’m in, I care about being around people who I love and who are nourishing.

Eric: Mollie and Lauren put out a lot of love into the world, and that’s really the key to making this work. You two put out a lot of love, and help people, and then the people worth anything at all will reciprocate and commit to the friendship.

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