wedge blog

There are nine people looking at the house next door. I don’t like any of them.

With my luck, it’s the harried-looking woman, the one dressed in pastel polyester. It would be OK to have a neighbor with angst, but this lady appears overwhelmed with classic dust-bowl fatalism. Here she is, after church, with Ma and Pa and Grandma and three kids, plus two calm-looking older folks making sweeping gestures like models on The Price is Right. Those two look like realtors.

The back yard is so small that the lady with a little kid in the crook of one arm is now standing in my yard. Great. Where are the rowdy neighbors in the alley when I need them? I’d love for one of them to pitch an oversize can of ‘Natural’ over the eight foot fence. If I had known there was going to be an “open house” I would have bought the folks in the alley a case of hootch at the gas station, just to make things lively.

Maybe I should run out there waving plans for a two-story garage that would block any sunlight from ever reaching any room in that house, Amen.

The widow lady who lived behind us for twenty one years–now there was a good neighbor– despite her yippy rodent and the occasional north wind that sucked smoke from her chimney into our family room. God bless her, she was nearly blind, so I could romp in the yard in any state of disarray or undress, plus she never listened to any music, especially ‘country’ or ‘gospel’ or (gulp) ‘white country gospel’.

That house is just the right size for one, or maybe two quiet adults, not a young family of four or five. It sits only about ten feet from my back door, since at one time it was the ‘carriage house’ for the place I’ve called home for the last two decades.

I don’t want to deal with a thirty-something divorced mother yelling at her three kids while I’m trying to weed the herb garden and listen to NPR. I don’t want her being friendly at the back door. I don’t want her asking my husband to ‘loan her a tool’, and I don’t want her ex showing up at odd hours providing vocal counterpoint to the already operatic pathos that plays out in the alley.

I fervently hope she goes somewhere else…now the adults are huddled just outside my window, and the kids are climbing my 115-year old decorative wrought iron fence (except the one in the tired lady’s arms, and I think I smell that one).

God, I hope she doesn’t have a dog. Every time I look at a dog I see an asterisk of an asshole, and envision its center dilating and depositing organic waste like a pasta extruder.

I’m in no mood for neighbors.