It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

My parents have received two citations from the City of Charlotte--one about mowing the grass, and one about clearing weeds from the borders of the property. After the first, we were a bit suspicious--only the backyard grass was high enough to write home about, and it seemed unlikely that roving inspectors whose job it is to find flaw with Charlotte citizens' lawn hygiene (whom we didn't know existed prior to our citation) would have noticed. The second one was a pretty big tip-off that this was not just our unluck of being chosen at random. We were being ratted out by our neighbors.

Picture this: we live in a lovely neighborhood full of lovely folks, most of whom voted for Kerry, many of whom have children and dogs and say hi as you pass and sit on their porches sipping wine in the summer twilight. Most people in our neighborhood would never get this kind of citation, but if they did, they would probably have a good idea of which of their neighbors was the tattletale. But we happen to live between two houses whose inhabitants were equally likely to have made the fateful call. So naturally, after grumbling about having to fix the lawn mower, our family conversations fell to the topic of which neighbors were the culprits.

Neighbor A, on the left side, as you're facing our house, was my mother's favored contender. Let's call her Lurlene for our purposes here. For the 12 years that we've lived here, she has lived alone, keeping the same daily routine, becoming older and dumpier year by year as the weight of time crashes upon her. She works in a security booth at some ritzy subdivision, but be not fooled--she doesn't really come across as the bouncer type. The church on our corner holds weekly AA meetings, and the attendees' cars have been known to spill over now and again onto the street. Lurlene's response was to put up a sign reading "No AA Parking" in front of her house. A few years ago, she cut down a big tree in her yard, which was the only beautiful thing about said yard in the first place, and replaced it with gravel on which to park her car. My dad has not spoken to her since.

Neighbors B, on the right side, shall hereby be called John and Maude. John is probably approaching 60 if he's not there already, and Maude is his mother, about whose age we will not venture a guess. John does some kind of work with computers in South Carolina, and Maude spends her time spying on her neighbors out the window and playing computer solitaire. She comes out to have a word with us if we or our visitors park in front of our house too close to her driveway, since it would be unsafe for her to back out (in her estimation). That's if she had somewhere to go, which seems a rather rare occurrence--but then, I don't spy on her as often as she probably does on me, so I'm not 100% sure. They have a can-crusher mounted on the side of their house outside my bedroom window, and they seem to get great joy from crushing about 50 cans a day at 7:00 in the morning. They have a greyhound that John walks once in the morning and once in the evening to a distance of about 4 houses away before returning home. Once, a tree limb from one of our trees was hanging over their side porch roof and threatening everything they hold dear. They told us we would have to pay for them to call someone to take care of it. My dad said he would do it. They said this was unacceptable for liability reasons. My dad said he wouldn't pay for someone else to do it. Finally, they said he could do it as long as he didn't set foot on their property, which proved impossible. He did end up standing on their property to remove the limb, a situation complicated by Maude's insistence on standing beside him for the entire process. They remind me of the ancient lady on the street where I grew up whose only pleasure in life was yelling at me when I ran around without shoes in the summertime.

My mom's arguments for Lurlene were strong. Lurlene is very picky about her yard, and keeps her grass trimmed within an inch of its life. She has just planted vegetables right next to our yard on her side of the fence, and she's probably mad that they're shaded by our vegetation. And she doesn't speak to us anymore. My mom says she'll say "Hi, Lurlene," and receive no response. I was not so convinced--John and Maude seemed just as strong contenders at least in the having-nothing-better-to-do department. They had a yard sale recently in which they had many items for sale for hundreds of dollars: camera lenses, darkroom equipment, a spotless guitar, computer hard drives. They came over and encouraged us to come to their yard sale. We went, but unfortunately I had neither the $700 nor the space to construct my own darkroom, so I contented myself with buying two Beach Boys records for $1 each. Before completing the sale they asked if we were sure we didn't want a camera or a hard drive. When the yard sale was over, they asked if we wanted to buy any more of their records (most of which were German Christmas music).

Within my family, we all tended to agree that the only way to know for sure was to confront them, but no one wanted to be the one to do it. Lurlene was considered the more likely candidate, and my dad refuses to talk to her. My mom decided it was surely her and set about hacking away all the vegetation on that side of the yard that could in any way offend. It took two days. She did some basic pruning of the other side as well, and two weeks later an inspector appeared at our doorstep, saying he was here to mow our grass. By this time, our grass had died. "We don't have any grass," my mother said. He admitted that this appeared to be the case. "In that case, I'm here to trim your border weeds," he offered. My mom said she had done that. He agreed, and they were in the yard trying to decide of there were any left that were complaint-worthy, when John, from his side of the fence, asked why we hadn't cleared the side for which we had received the citation (which, for the record, made no mention of sides).

The mystery was solved. At least, now, we could find out which weeds had been cause for complaint. In a striking instance of deja-vu, there were some that could not be cleared from our side of the property, but Maude initially insisted that we couldn't set foot on hers. She did offer a half-apology: regarding the citation, "I'm sorry we had to do that to you." My dad asked her why she didn't just ask us. She didn't have much of an answer.

A couple of days ago, a for-sale sign appeared in the yard of John and Maude. Despite initial celebration, my family's reactions were mixed. "They're giving us their collapsible carport," my mom pointed out. "And Maude asked if we all made it safely home from the trips we took this month." My sister and I bemoaned the loss of their wireless internet. My dad had the most forboding: what if the next neighbors are worse? What if they play loud music, or have yappy dogs, or gang-member adolescent sons? What if they tear down John and Maude's little house and build a big one (the trend in our neighborhood) and we have to deal with the noise and ugliness of its construction for the next year? What if they're, as my sister is fond of saying, Republicans for Voldemort? It's becoming apparent that there could be evils worse than the evils we know. Only time will tell.