What makes a good neighbor?

When I first moved into my current house there was an elderly woman who lived next door. She asked if she could put her trash in my bin because she was waiting for the city to issue her a smaller one as she lived alone. That started a big mess. Every trash day, even after she got her new bin, her trash wound up in mine.

She didn’t like the bins at the street all day so she would bring mine up. She would have a fit because my bin would stink – I was disposing of dog waste as instructed by the city – so I should hose it out after every pickup. Mostly I ignored her.

Then she tried to have a lawn care company spray my yard for weeds. They refused because it wasn’t her property. So this crazy woman would sit in my yard that bordered hers across the driveway when I was at work and pull “weeds” some of which were wildflowers I had planted to discourage her from wandering over.

She reported me to the city because I didn’t mow my lawn often enough for her. It was mostly white clover which doesn’t grow that tall. It was lush and green and not over the height the city cares about. The side across the driveway was literally scalped by her. She would pluck out the plants and either toss them on the driveway or pile them on top of the trash bin.

I had some workers come by to fill in an old well. We found that what I thought was a patio was the roof of a room built out from the basement that used to house the well. Prior owners/tenants had used the room to dump all kinds of trash and paint cans in there. The doorway at some point had been bricked up. I’m not certain how the home inspector missed that.

Before we discovered this, I used to wonder about the horrible stench in my basement when the sun heated up what was the concrete roof. My basement also flooded six inches deep before we found the source of the leak. The contractor had to make the opening larger where an outside pump had been in order to access that room. The guys very nicely filled at least 10 large trash bags with the junk they pulled out of there.

Mrs. Nosy Neighbor called the city because I had too many trash bags at the side of my garage. They must have told her that it wasn’t a problem if I was regularly putting them in the trash bin. She told me she got a quote for me from Waste Management for a dumpster so I could get rid of the bags. By this time, most of the bags were gone because the city had given me one of the larger sized bins.

I came home from work one day and there were 4 vinyl fence panels in her yard. She was having them installed because I spoiled her view, which by the way, was the side of my garage and part of the driveway. By the time the fence was installed, all of the extra bags were gone.

She had complained that the sight of my trash cans had also spoiled her view. At that time, the cans were at the side of my garage. I moved them past the edge of the fence. Two weeks later, there were new fence panels installed which gave me more privacy from her snooping. A little devil whispered in my ear that I should keep moving the cans down the side of my driveway to see how many fence panels I could get her to install. Alas, she had a horrible fall and her son packed her off to assisted living.

The house was sold and I now have much nicer neighbors who don’t need a perfect lawn and who cut their grass whenever. We all mind our own business except the few times in the summer when we used to watch for strangers just sitting in idling cars. Because of our location and the fact that most of us at the time worked, drug dealers would do business on our block.

When I retired, I made a point of being out in the yard and weeding or just sitting on the porch. If the cars parked and no one got out, I would hold up my phone. They would usually take off. Funny story – my neighbor across the street was home one day and saw a black suv with tinted windows sitting in front of my house and came over and banged on the window. It was an undercover officer waiting to see if any dealers were going to cruise over.

There hasn’t been too much of that sort of traffic in the past couple of years. I guess the word got out that there’s a lot more people who are home now. Several of my neighbors work from home and some of us are retired. I have the dubious honor of now being the oldest person on the block. I was one of the younger ones when I moved in.