We have an itty bitty ‘yard’ in front of our condo, mostly just plants with some landscaping chips and a few stepping stones.
There’s a gaggle of kids that play in the condo’s common area every night. Every couple of weeks or so a few of them will decide that our little yard is also part of the common area and start doing I don’t even know what. Riding their bikes through it, running around and tearing it up, tossing the chips all over the sidewalk, screaming, and just being annoying in general.
My husband and I have no problem at all with yelling a “Stay off our yard!” at the little hooligans.
Last week there were some kids crashing a shopping cart into a light post right under my bedroom window for a good 10 minutes. I kept waiting for a parent or somebody to intervene until I finally went out there and told them to knock it off because the noise was ridiculously annoying.
I’m half the age of a senior citizen and I don’t want kids playing in my yard. They can be destructive little shits.
A lot of children and teenagers have no concept of what does and doesn’t belong to them. There are two little boys in the neighborhood who seem to think every house is their playground. They’ve been told over and over again to stay out of the yard and they keep coming back.
They break tree limbs, pick all the flowers, try to climb fences, chase animals, etc etc. I can understand why their parents don’t want the little destructo-kids around THEIR yard, but the rest of the neighbors are pretty sick of it.
So, long story short, I’m 33 and proud to say GET OFF MY LAWN.
I used to visit an old bloke who had an immaculate lawn…apart from the Humber Super Snipe which had sunk into it up to the door level. He just mowed around it.
I never actually had an old man yell “get off my lawn” at me, but I did once have an old man yell “get off my street” at me when I was riding my bike. I didn’t feel too compelled to oblige, however, seeing as I lived on the same street thus making it my street, too.
Not that he’d have had any right to keep me off the street anyway had I lived elsewhere. It just made it even more absurd to think he was trying to keep me off my own street.
One of my earliest memories is of riding my tricycle down the street with my brother and sister. I fell over, and landed in Mrs. Toth’s front yard. We knew better than to set foot in her yard, but all I did was fall on a tiny portion of her yard. She must have been watching from the windows, because she came out yelling at me…my brother grabbed me up, and grabbed the tricycle and we ran home…two doors away. Her sister moved in with her a few years later, and became my mom’s best friend…but the older sister was just nasty to us. And the yard wasn’t anything to brag about, either. And even though we kids would get together and play in large groups, we never ran across other people’s lawns unless we had permission …our mother’s were very strict with us! Now my mom is the kind who won’t exactly go out and yell, but she put out rocks so no one could park on our treelawn, and she keeps an eye out. For her it is more of a safety thing, being essentially alone. And there are no longer large groups of kids who hang out and play ball in the yards or play tag or Pickle in the Middle. Their mothers keep them indoors.
As someone with an 83 year-old mother, I’d say they do it because…they have nothing else to do, 16 hours a day. She gets pissy beyond belief about little stuff, things she wouldn’t have wasted five minutes on 20 years ago. She just sits and stews about it all day. Thankfully she doesn’t have a yard.
About a year ago (I’m 24) I was at a small grocery store down the street. The side of the building runs flat up against the buildings to the left and right. The building to the left doesn’t only have regular steps… they’re a half circle above a half circle made of brick… No railings.
While waiting for a friend inside I sat on the bottom step… 3 feet from the door of the grocery store.
Within seconds I heard the door open and I got up, thinking whoever it was wanted to get past.
“I’M CALLING THE POLICE, STAY RIGHT THERE, DON’T TRY TO RUN! I HAVE YOUR PICTURE! DO NOT TRY AND MOVE, YOU WILL BE RUNNING FROM THE COPS IF YOU DO!”
The lady was probably in her 60s or so.
I said “Hey, sorry, didn’t realize it’d bother you.”
Right then my friend came out of the store and looked at me quizzically… We just walked away. No cops hunted us down.
I worked with the elderly for some time years ago and can say that while many old ladies are sweet and nice some are just plain vindictive and spiteful… Family members apologized many times saying that they used to be fine before they started to lose their mind or couldn’t take care of themselves as well because of becoming weaker over the years.
I started yelling at kids to get off my (parents) lawn at a young age. I still lived at home and we had a grade school down the road from us. When they walked home the little hooligans would come by our house and steal fruit from the citrus trees and then throw them at each other. My parents wouldn’t have cared if they took the oranges to eat but they were wasting it and hurting each other with it. If I saw them I’d usually run out and tell them I was going to follow them home and talk to their parents. They’d take off running so I couldn’t follow them. It got them off the lawn.
Our next door neighbors are like this. They’re both at least in their 70’s, and have nothing better to do apparently than worry about their yard and garden. They have a horror of grass clippings getting onto their side of the property line, which I can tolerate, but the husband crossed the line when he told our 13 year old that he would call the cops on my son if any clippings got onto his side of the lawn.
Of course, these are the same people who throw fireworks parties on the 4th of July and shoot them in our direction. This is especially fun when it’s very dry, as we get to wonder if they’re going to set our garage on fire.
But on the other hand, I’m sure the kids on our other side see me as being that sort of person, what with my getting upset because they beat all the blooms off our snowball bush and picked all the lilacs they could reach. I probably wouldn’t have minded the lilacs if they’d asked, but they didn’t bother to ask.
