The next time she lights up her chainsaw, head on over to her place with your own chainsaw and a hockey goalie’s mask, and ask her if you can join in the fun.
Splitting with a hydraulic splitter and then stacking is much more easy if there are two or three people – as good an excuse as you will ever find to going over and making good with her. Does she use a hydraulic splitter?
Do not grow more angry because she’s avoiding you!
She may well be avoiding you because she is embarrassed by her own behaviour, regardless of how she reacted at the time!
Take the first step, you can mend this I’m confident!
Has she used it since?
If you are sorry that you were overly aggressive, apologize for being snappish and for waiting so long to apologize. Your apology should be sincere and should not be based on what you expect from her.
You have the most important things in common. The things that you have listed – especially race and age – are shallow differences. Make friends if you can. A woman her age may have lived through some rough times.
I get hung up on the silliest things…how did she hear the phone while she was outside using a chainsaw?
I recently made peace with the neighbors my elderly mother had ticked off. They now smile and wave and say hi to me. When I told Mom what I had done, she said “oh, good, now I can talk to them about (some silly thing she felt they were doing wrong)”. I told her she was not allowed to talk to them about anything, ever, and to let me handle them from now on. She just doesn’t get it.
Simple solution, send Mr McQ round - we males can be pretty versatile, especially when it comes to explaining why you were so annoyed.
I doubt that she’ll ever interrupt your sex life again
- but you might get some astonishing advice
He can do a: Xa(nthia) is embarrassed but you see she got this book on rhythms …
Elderly ladies can be very interested in prurient matters.
If she’s avoiding you, I would drop in a note or card - it might be that she’s frightened. If you think you’ve left it too long, well, you can write that on the card too.
But wait until she’s not using the chainsaw.
Not that I would use a chain saw at 7 am (or ever) but I have to say that I think that’s sort of the beginning of the day and it’s borderline okay to do any kind of outdoor work then. Sleeping in isn’t an unalienable right. Certainly one has more of a right to not be yelled at on the phone by their neighbor.
That being said, I’d go for the icebreaker as opposed to the apology.
Okay, let me clear up about who was using the chainsaw. It wasn’t her, it was some guy she had who delivered a load of wood for her. According to what I remember of what she said(it was early and I was just barely awake, and so was she from the sound of things) she said something like it had to be done at the crack of dawn because she had to be there while he did it, and she had to go someplace else later during the day. It made no sense to me then and it still doesn’t. Who delivers firewood without cutting and splitting it first? What difference does it make if she’s there if he’s just delivering it to her woodpile outside, in a fence that she doesn’t lock?
All that aside, I probably overreacted, especially after I called to ask what was going on(I meant to start out politely, but there is a good chance I sounded accusatory from the start) and I got what sounded like a nonsensical reason and not a shred of contrition about my feelings about being woken up or all the racket. If she had said ‘sorry about this, but I couldn’t arrange it any other time’ I don’t think I would have blown up, but she never mentioned being sorry, just that it was only convenient to her then. The extent of my blowing up was to stress rather angrily how close her woodpile, and the guy with the chainsaw was to my bedroom window(less than ten feet) and to angrily inform her that it was not very convenient to me. And I hung up.
Within a day I felt guilty about losing my temper. I really am a terrible grouch in the morning, but there was no reason to expect her to be any better or more diplomatic when she wasn’t very awake either. I figured I’d see her in passing within a day or three, working in her yard or getting the mail or whatever, as always, head over and say ‘I’m sorry I was upset.’ But she’s pointedly been avoiding me, preventing me from doing it casually.
My current thinking is to make some kind of gesture of friendship, like offering her food or something for her garden without bringing up the incident again.
I’d say bite the bullet and go talk to her. I had a somewhat similar incident at work (a co-worker blew up at me - apparently I had been annoying her for a while without knowing it). I avoided her after her blow-up, and it just stayed awkward and uncomfortable between us. If I had it to do over again, I would have made peace with her after a day or so, instead of letting things fester and be unpleasant for everyone.
How to approach it; go knock on her door when you think she’ll be in, and say something like, “I appreciate having a neighbour like you, and I feel badly that things seem strained between us. I’m sorry for having snapped at you*. Do you think we can put this behind us and go back to being good neighbours?”
And as with most hard things, the easiest way to get through it is to just go do it.
*No, there shouldn’t have been chainsaws going at 7:00 am. But your snapping just made it worse, and that is what you should apologize for.
Geezus, that made me laugh. 
When I first read the OP, I had a question, but I sat on my hands, telling myself, “Don’t go there.” Still, I really wanted an answer.
Then I read this followup the next morning. Again, I sat on my hands.
But I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I really want to ask it. But know that it’s not an accusatory question.
For the purposes of dealing with a neighbor who hired someone to run a chainsaw at 7:00 a.m. and a response that was uncivil at best…what do race, religion, and politics have to do with it?
(I swear I’m not trying to stir up shit.)
Race, age, religion and politics play a role in whether or not we are likely to ever be close friends, instead of just civil neighbors. Not that I haven’t had some friends who were of different ages, races, religions and political leanings. I was just saying we had very little in common and I was doubtful I would ever want to develop a closer relationship with her, and and I am somewhat ambivalent about even salvaging the civil part. :rolleyes:
In general I think it’s an excellent idea to avoid disputes with neighbours.
So I would use one of the techniques already mentioned (not the one where you wear a mask and have a chainsaw, though that was funny 
), and the sooner the better.
It’s pretty common. Every fall I hesitate to accept dinner invitations, for often it turns out to be cutting, splitting and stacking for a few hours prior to dinner.
A friend said she invited me each year because I like cutting, splitting and stacking. That’s what I got for simply trying to be a good guest. I hate cutting, splitting and stacking, but I put a good face on it.
Since I would rather cut than haul, I went out and bought a chainsaw – paid all of five dollars for it, and it runs nicely. Unfortunately, my friend’s neighbours heard about that, so for the last couple of years they have been inviting me to “dinner” in the fall.
I’d much rather socialize via a few rubbers of bridge, but with these folks, it’s cutting, splitting and stacking.
To be fair, I enjoy saunas at my friend’s place, so it stands that I should help with the wood that fuels it. Her friends are older, so it is only simple human decency to help them with their wood. You take the good with the bad – and make some good friends along the way, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the need to cut, split and stack wood.
Perhaps your should mend fences by letting her know that there’s a wonderful new invention called central heating which doesn’t require any wood at all!
She’s bound to be grateful.
(seriously, where the hell do you people live that you and/or your neighbors require truckloads of firewood?)
I live in a forest in northwestern Ontario. A lot of people who live in the sticks burn sticks in the winter, sometimes as the primary heat soure, but more often as the supplemental heat source.
I hear that further south in the big cities they burn witches, but don’t quote me on this.
Gandhi said:“It is possible to live in peace”
I would find an easy time to approach her, and make an inclusive apology for the incident. “wow! that was an unfortunate incident! I really value you as a neighbour, sorry if what I said made you feel attacked… I guuess our schedules did not line up that day!”
If she doesn’t reply in a understanding and neighbourly way… nuke her from orbit… its the only way
actually , inform her of the local noise laws (Most of them come into effect at 9 or 10 AM on Sundays, and include lawn and landscaping equipment.
good fences make good neighbours, but good nieghbours don’t need good fences
(Albert Einstien) My Life-as I see it - 1953
regards
FML