Last night, after the rain stopped and the ground dried out to a reasonable extent, I had a limited window of time to plant the flowers that I’ve been keeping in my kitchen until the weather warmed up enough for them to not die. Also, if I didn’t do something about my lawn soon, prior experience suggests my neighbors would start taking things into their own hands. My neighbors are weird, and extraordinarily up in my business. I have included the below high-definition image to illustrate my neighborhood’s weirdness factor.
So I went outside, grabbed my spade, and started digging a couple spots to put my coral bells. When I turned around to rest the spade against the garage wall, there, standing in the middle of my driveway, was Ruby.
Ruby is my neighbor’s Springer Spaniel. She’s incredibly shy, very sweet, and has no idea where the property line is. That’s because her owners never taught her. They have no fence (one of the first things they did once I bought the house was chop it down without asking me, despite it technically being MY fence), and more often than not, they just kind of shove her out the door unsupervised when she needs to relieve herself.
My front yard is her favorite spot for that.
But other than that, Ruby is my kind of dog–she never barks, she does everything slowly and cautiously, and she’s more afraid of people generally than I am of her. Usually we take one step at a time toward each other until I’m close enough to give her head scritches.
So anyway, I gave her some head scritches and told her she was a Good Girl and a Pretty Girl, because it’s not her fault her owner is a jerk, and I feel like she doesn’t get enough of that at home. And, speak of the devil, out lumbered her owner.
Remember me talking about the lady who writes passive-aggressive sidewalk chalk messages to her husband? This is the guy they’re aimed at.
“Seems like you like dogs better than you like people,” he observed with a smarmy grin.
I certainly like your dog better than I like you, I corrected him in my head.
Anyway, once I got those plants in the ground, I tried to at least make an effort to tame my lawn, starting with the strip that runs along Beard’s back yard.
Beard is my other neighbor, and he’s a pretty cool guy. Unfortunately, he and I are forever politely working around a housing arrangement that makes every day life pretty awkward. Namely, our yard layouts are as follows:
Our houses both used to be owned by the same guy, who ran an illegal woodworking shop out of a shed in the back.
‘Shed’ isn’t really accurate. In Beard’s backyard is a two-car garage that is larger than my house.
Let me back up. Beard’s house had its own, different, regular-sized, attached garage once. At some point, the previous owner decided to close the garage door up under some siding so that it could never be opened. On the inside, it was still a garage, with a cement floor and a garage door that could not be opened because it was under the siding, rendering the entire room completely pointless. Why this was done, neither of us have a clue. One of the first things Beard did was tear off all the siding so he could use it as a garage again.
But as I was saying, there is a second, gigantic, looming garage behind Beard’s house. That’s where the previous owner ran his illegal woodworking shop, while he rented out the two actual houses to tenants. I say illegal, because being completely off the village’s radar had some advantages, namely not having to follow any safety regulations despite the constant use of flammable liquids, power tools, and fire.
(Fun fact: when I started renting my house before purchasing it, it had zero smoke detectors in it.)
Eventually, the village figured out about the clandestine carpentry shop–perhaps because of the 25-foot flagpole and huge sign advertising the business that had been installed on my house’s lawn. (Just a guess.) They told him he had to install a sprinkler system so he didn’t kill anyone. He decided that was too expensive, sold us the houses, and eventually vacated his black market wood shed.
He did leave the 25-foot flagpole, which rusted and started leaning precariously because the previous owner was also a lazy jerk who cut corners at every opportunity, and therefore didn’t anchor this extremely heavy, 25-foot tall piece of metal into the ground with cement like you’re supposed to. On the plus side, that meant that, when I finally got sick of looking at it a couple weeks ago, all I had to do was dig down about 3 feet and it lifted right out of the ground. … Of course, I’m still trying to figure out how to dispose of a rusty flag pole.
Anyway, my point was that the previous owner treated our two properties as one entity, which is why Beard and I are still in the middle of the years long process of slowly extricating them. I got rid of the shoddily constructed patio that crossed the property line, he made sure the heat supply for the shed wasn’t coming from my house’s gas line, etc. But there are some things we just can’t work around. For example, Beard uses his house-sized shed to restore classic cars… But the only way to get a car back there is through my carport. So, with my standing permission, Beard will occasionally move all my patio furniture out of the way and move a car, or its major parts, through my carport. He feels guilty about this, so he will occasionally mow part or all of my lawn for me as penance. I feel guilty about THAT, so I sometimes snowblow his driveway for him, and so on and so forth, as we both continually escalate our war of politeness.
But yesterday I was determined to mow at least some of the lawn before Beard could out-nice me, which leads to the next problem: I don’t really have a back yard. The yard in the back of my house is actually Beard’s back yard, except for a small strip right along my house. This is occasionally awkward when Beard throws yard parties, because his guests tend to set up their lawn chairs right underneath my bathroom window.
This shouldn’t be a problem any more, because Beard recently put up a small chain link fence along the property line. It was necessary because he acquired a small, hypervigilant dog, and unlike my other neighbors, he’s actually putting effort into keeping said dog contained. This little guy is tenacious; he dutifully protects Beard’s yard from such nefarious invaders as the stray beams of light from my back window.
When I got tired of being barked at, I parked the lawn mower back in the garage and grabbed a yard bag, and when I turned around…
I’ve mentioned the apartment dwellers across the street before, right? The ones that don’t seem to ever work or even really leave the complex ever, but do spend a disproportionate amount of time sitting on their patios smoking and staring at whatever happens to be in front of them, which is my house?
One of them was standing on the opposite sidewalk. I’ve never seen one out and about before.
It was kind of like in a horror movie, where you see the zombie from a distance and then the camera pans away for a couple seconds, and then it pans back and the zombie is right behind you.
And I did get a definite zombie vibe from her. She stood completely motionless, except for the cigarette she kept bringing to her mouth, with her legs slightly apart in a stance that told me she wasn’t planning on moving again soon. And there was no mistaking she was staring at me. Her entire body was facing me, and she was 20 feet away. There was nothing else for her to look at but me and the contents of my garage.
I stared back at her for a good fifteen seconds, and nothing changed. She just kept staring at me, occasionally puffing the cigarette.
Finally, I gave her a tentative wave, just to see how she would respond.
It seemed to take her brain several seconds to register the movement, and then suddenly, it was like someone hit her on switch. She gave me an animated wave back, and then finally turned and started sauntering away in an overly casual manner, even picking up a downed tree branch and twirling it as if to demonstrate, ‘just out for a casual walk. Definitely not conducting reconnaissance for my eventual break-in to your garage.’
Thoroughly weirded out, I went back inside. You know what? The rest of my yard could stay messy for a while. I preferred to work without an audience.
Laura Writes 