With permission, I use a neighbour's wifi. The house is about half a block away.
Since OP mentioned being in a rural area, I went back to read the first post and saw that OP is a meaningful distance away from the router in question. That's actually the main problem here. Regular wireless routers simply don't have that much range, especially when going from inside one home to inside another home. This is especially true when talking about the common 2.4Ghz routers. A brand new 5Ghz 802.11ac router would potentially do the trick, but that router would need to be the router in command in the neighbor's house.
OP, just so we're all clear, can you estimate the actual distance we're talking about here, either in feet or meters?
For reference, the indoor range ratings for each standard are probably most appropriate here since we're talking about one router being inside one house and the other use point being inside a separate house:
802.11g: 38m / 125 feet
802.11n: 70m / 230 feet
802.11ac: 35m / 115 feet
Although technically ac is the shortest range, what I've seen in testing is that a 5Ghz ac router will provide the best real-world range. Further, a lot of "n" routers are crippled by sitting on the crowded 2.4Ghz band which frequently suffers a lot of interference. Still, that band is actually supposed to be better for range, and yeah, you do see a higher range listing for n than ac.
Still: when the op says half a block, I read that to mean a lot more than 230 feet. A directional solution
such as what MMM set up for his own home/neighbor's home may be required, and honestly you really need to be something of a home networking expert to pull that off. I have technically gotten a pair of routers set up at my own home as source/repeater but it was a total nightmare to get it to work and involved going through multiple custom router operating systems and configurations before I came up with something even remotely stable.