I was working in the front yard, and my son came and told me that the next door neighbor had told him to be quiet (the neighbor - actually the neighbor’s son - was apparently visiting his parents for the day, and had just woken up).
I went into the back yard, where my son and his friend were playing, and started doing my yardwork there. The neighbor’s son came back out of the house and yelled over the fence that I needed to “keep those kids quiet”. I responded “No, he can play in his back yard”. As far as I remember, I used pretty much those words. I was trying to be assertive rather than aggressive. Not yelling, not defiant, not hostile - clear.
The neighbor’s son was bigger than me, but most of it was around his waist, and he apparently was not in the mood for a major confrontation. He went back into his parents’ house. He then apparently left, and about an hour later the neighbor herself came out and more-or-less apologized and told me her son was hung over and cranky.
As I said, we got along well with those neighbors. And I honestly don’t feel that my son and his buddy were being unreasonably loud for 2:00pm on a Sunday.
It was what I would consider a fairly normal neighborhood as far as noise is concerned. The neighbors on the other side had a pool, and occasional pool parties. There were teenagers with occasionally loud stereos, bad mufflers, barking dogs, and the like. My rule of thumb is that it is a problem if it goes past 10:00pm, but other than that, better to try to get along than otherwise.
As I got to know the neighbors, there were several rather unpleasant feuds going on, and I tried not to get sucked into them. Same thing in our current neighborhood. The people who lived in our house before us couldn’t get along with my next-door neighbor, who is a little eccentric but not at all nasty.
But the overall stress level in the are has gone down considerably since the police shot my neighbor across the street.
Regards,
Shodan
