wince I’m kind of afraid that we were one of these houses.
When we first bought this house, my ex and I were working 12+ hour days and most of our hobbies were inside ones. So we never saw or spoke to any of our neighbors. He never would have let the lawn get too bad, but a lot of the time he was mowing in the twilight, and a lot of other outside stuff didn’t get done.
Then he changed jobs to one with normal hours, and we got dogs, so he started seeing people regularly. Then I switched to working from home part time, so I saw people a little more. And then I went to full telecommuting, so it must have looked like I was home all day and never came out of the house except to walk the dogs, but I wasn’t invisible anymore. (Then I became unemployed, but I doubt that was visible from the outside, though it wasn’t secret to the people I chatted with during walks.) And then he moved out, and I had literally never mowed a lawn before (never having lived alone before), so it took me a couple of months to work up my nerve and figure out how to start the mower.
So, yeah, sorry, neighbors.
A possible explanation for some of the seemingly empty houses - my realtor has another house also on this street, but it doesn’t have a For Sale sign out front. Apparently, it had been bought and refurbished by a company for use by employees during long term travel. But before it was ever used, the company pulled out of this area. Rather then to lose money on the deal, they’re holding onto it until the market improves enough to sell at a profit. In the meantime, a service keeps up the property.
Not MY corner…in my old neighborhood in North Olmsted, near WalMart. And I love your neighbor’s tableau…it’s weird, but it keeps the world from being boring, no? Good job on the picture link!
Now the house on MY corner has a huge front yard…and a length of chainlink fence running from the edge of the house out to the middle of the yard…and then it stops. It’s not enclosing anything. It’s nowhere near the property line. Just a stretch of fence. Perpendicular to that, running out to the side of the yard, are two or three metal stakes in the yard, as if another line of fencing was going to go there…but it also goes nowhere, and encloses nothing. The whole set-up just makes mowing that place a pain, I am sure.
A few house farther down, on the next block, is a big house with three picture windows. Every Christmas they have three elaborate Christmas trees in the windows. At night, the lights will be on in the house and the curtains open. But until recently, I’ve never, ever seen anyone in the house. no one sitting in one of the three living rooms, nor walking through, nor outside. My mom told me years ago that they were quite rich and just kept adding on to the house instead of move. But if they had kids, they went to the private school. A few months ago I finally saw an elderly woman standing in the center living room, and a few weeks after that, a few people standing in the driveway. but I’ve lived here my whole life…those are the only sightings I’ve had when driving by. Maybe if I lived closer it wouldn’t be so mysterious, but it’s so odd.
That was so worth waiting for! What the heck??? Have you met the person who lives there? I can’t figure out if they’re trying to be funny somehow, or if they’re just nuts.
Awww, it really quite cute. I’m betting there’s a sad story behind it, like it’s a tribute to a girl who died.
The hippo in the flowers makes me think of our “There are Hippos in my Garden”. I wonder how she’s faring?
I’m sure the neighbors who don’t know me must wonder extensively. For instance, for several weeks now the front bushes have been in desperate need of trimming. We’re talking super ugly here, and the path to the front door almost completely overrun, not anything someone could miss. But it’s kinda tough to pull out the hedge clippers safely with a curious 2-year-old around, and if I do it while she’s napping the noise just wakes her.
Sooo, after several weeks of her Dad not showing up, he finally came this Sunday to see her and I got to start on it. I got the path opened up, and one bush trimmed. Then a bird flew out of the next bush into my face, startling me, and I cut the extension cord. (Second time that’s happened!)
Then I started trying to rake up the clippings I had managed to produce, but my back went out again and I spent the rest of the day just crawling around the house.
So the tableau outside is now one beautiful bush, surrounded by overgrown ones, and a rake and a pile of clippings killing the grass. (And yes, as a matter of fact he COULD have gotten those for me, but that would require lifting a finger, which is against his religion. . .)
[Sigh] Goodness knows I try . . .
I find my next door neighbor’s house mysterious. First of all, neighbor is never, ever home. She is a single woman in her 50s (I think) who has some sort of job that requires near-constant travel. I’ve talked to her once and seen her maybe two or three other times in the 7 years we’ve lived here. What I find strange is that she had a two story extension built onto the house that she never ever uses, and this extension has only two windows - one very small one on the first floor and one moderate sized window on the second floor. What are these rooms being used for? Why would you to to the trouble and expense to build rooms with so few windows? Also mysterious to me is the in-ground pool in the backyard. It hasn’t been used in years, so the tarp covering it has stretched considerably and generally holds a foot or so of stagnant, mosquito-breeding rainwater. All summer this year she’s had some sort of pump system set up in a way that looks like it’s intended to drain the pond, but it never finishes! How hard can it be??
Maybe they’re stashing bags in the trunk of their car every now and then and hauling it to a similar place. Don’t know. And this is a family of five with one kid still in diapers, so there must be an awful lot of bags to haul.
I’ve never seen the wife, but I’m pretty sure she teaches piano lessons or something because of kids going in and out after school and cars waiting. I think probably she takes care of the inside and he takes care of the outside. He is obsessive. For instance, he cleans off the driveway and he seals it. He probably scrubs it. Then kids go by and brake with their bikes so there are always skid marks.
He had an absolute perfect lawn and he got rid of it and planted a new one. I think maybe he sold it as sod. Why else would you replace a perfectly good lawn.
I have seen a child in a wheelchair sometimes so I am assuming that is a grandchild.
I’m sure they are nice people. We just find it hard to understand why people put so much work into their lawn.
My next door neighbors used to hate us because our dog barks too much. Then the neighbor on the other side of them got a new wife. They have concentrated all of their energy and hate on this woman for some reason. So we are no longer hated. When she was putting twinkle lights out in the back yard the neighbor screamed out of the window, “When is enough enough??” It’s weird because the new lady has made entire property absolutely gorgeous with her gardening. She’s really nice.
The neighbors next door will call the police if you are mowing your lawn one minute past the deadline, which I think is 9:00 p.m.
I wondered where they had moved to. There used to be a house down the block occupied by a family, all of the members of which appeared to suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or some other developmental disability. Honestly, they looked like those manipulated photos of the so-called Kallikak family. One daughter periodically went door to door apparently offering to do odd jobs (it was hard to tell, since she spoke in a distinctive, but unintelligible, sing-song voice). The house was remarkable in that the family appeared to own light-up plastic decorations for every - and I mean every - holiday for which such decorations are manufactured.
A couple of years ago I realized they were no longer living there, and shortly thereafter the house was torn down and the land turned into parking spaces.
Up until a few weeks ago we had “The Clapper”. Every time the guy would pull into his garage day or night, he’d close the garage door halfway, honk the horn in some sort of an indistinguishable pattern and then march around inside the garage for between 2-8 minutes clapping in offbeat rhythms. We assumed he had pretty severe OCD. They just moved though.
Then we had what we called the circus family, although they could have been witness protection. They were a weird combo of seemingly unrelated people. The guy looked kind of like Ron Jeremy crossed with Jackie Mason with red hair. He had some sort of European accent. Then they had a slightly younger guy who looked hispanic and sort of like Danny Trejo covered in tats and very wiry and weathered looking. There was an old Asian lady that looked like she was about 80 who didn’t speak any english, and a really fat kid who was about 12 years old. Every once and a while you’d see the guy walking this little yippy dog and every once and a while he’d kick it.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a family that seemed to have mortgaged their house to buy every single light-up nativity scene, Santa, reindeer, etc. they could get their hands on. I don’t think there was a single square inch of their property that wasn’t covered in lights or figures come Christmastime.
IIRC, hanging the Christmas tree upside-down from the ceiling is actually an old European (German?) tradition. I know the European Village at the Milwaukee Public Museum has had a ceiling-suspended tree for Christmas in the past.
The biggest mystery of my neighborhood is an alarm that goes off for long times and at random times. I think it’s actually drifting over from a small industrial park about a half mile away. I can’t imagine anyone would willingly put up with it coming from a neighbor’s house or car.
Just a faint and nearly endless psheeew-psheeew-psheeew-psheeew sort of noise.
Then there are two related mysteries for new people to the area… **What’s that SMELL!? **and What’s with that siren? Both come from a refinery a few miles away. Mix rotten eggs and a bag of lawn fertilizer to approximate the smell. When the winds are wrong, the odor just sits there like it was made of lead. Makes me wonder if it’s a plot by the electric utility to force people to stay inside with the windows shut and run the air conditioning. The siren is just a weekly test of their “If it’s not noon on Wednesday, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” system.
We have what I call the “ping-pong” neighbors. I’m friendly with the woman who lives there and her two sons, nothing strange about them.
Except almost every night between 9pm and Midnight I can hear them playing ping-pong non-stop in their basement. In almost dead silence. From my back deck I can see that the basement light is on, and I can hear the ball going back and forth, (they’re pretty good judging from the speed and length of volley), and eventually someone slamming a point, ball bouncing on the floor, followed by murmured hushed tones, before the next serve.
It’s a nightly, somber, three-hour ping-pong tournament. Believe me, I’ve tried to work ping-pong into our infrequent conversations, but they never bite.
Of course, this is Portland, where every curb horse ring has a little toy pony attached to it, so I don’t really consider silent ping-pong very weird.
My neighbor two doors away. Trash is collected on Wednesday mornings, and these people have a ton of trash by Monday, and it continues to grow. Furniture, appliances, a mountain of trash every week. And I always hear construction sounds coming from the house, lots of hammering and sawing. I think they manufacture their own trash, then throw it out.
The neighbor two doors away in the other direction. This guy obviously has OCD. Every single day, all year round, he’s out there with a gas-powered leaf blower. And he wears a gas mask. Even in winter with snow on the ground, there he is, chasing down the one leaf on his lawn. If he isn’t doing that, he’s sweeping his driveway, then the sidewalk, then the street in front of his house. If there’s snow, he shovels the driveway and sidewalk . . . with absolute precision . . . then shovels the street. His lawn looks like a putting green; I’ve seen him on his hands and knees, trimming the edges with a scissors. Oh, and he has “WARNING!” signs on his house, alerting people not to step on his lawn.
Supposedly, this guy is an ex-con who had committed armed robbery. So NOBODY fucks with him.
There’s a house on the next street that has no window coverings or landscaping. The yard has a lawn, but no bushes, shrubs, flowers, just a patch of dirt separating the house from the lawn. And they don’t have curtains or blinds on their windows. The place looks deserted, but there really are people living there.
This one’s from when I was a kid. The people next door to us were a couple with their teenage son. The grandmother lived in the garage. I don’t mean a converted garage, but an “as-is” garage. No electricity or heat or insulation. There was only one window, covered with a piece of filthy cloth. She slept on a cot in the corner and had a small table to eat on. This woman had no teeth, wore rags, and I think she never bathed. Of course all of us kids thought she was a witch, and ran away whenever she came out. The strange thing was that the family was not poor, their house was bigger than ours, and they certainly had room in the house for the grandma, especially when the boy went to college. But nobody ever saw the grandma go into the house.
