I called it stooping to her level because she, in the past few years, became so …houseproud is the best word I can find…and vindictive towards my mother over a tiny disagreement about the best way to treat that strip of grass that she began to complain about everything about our property…the height of our back lawn, the amount of time we took between mowings, the state of the paint on the house, the fact that leaves and branches from our trees would sometimes fall into her yard…doesn’t seem to bother her that leaves and branches from the neighbors on the OTHER side of her do the same thing. She would make loud, rude comments about my son. She would accuse him of ripping up her stick-and-string fence when in reality it was a deer one time (found portions of it in our backyard where the deer had finally shaken pieces of it loose) and the across the street neighbor’s guest after a party. She sneered. She berated my mother for the few occasions that our trashbags crossed the property line out at the street on our shared approach, which she has now filled with leaves.
We don’t really care about those kind of details about other people’s yards. The neighbors across from us don’t mow very often and put out amazing amounts of trash each week…doesn’t ever occur to us to fuss. And she’s not old…she’s the same age as me , 52. She and my mom used to be friends and talk all the time when they were outside working in the yard. But about the time she moved up from secretary to vice-president of the company her significant other runs, and started driving a Jag and a Hummer and another Jag, she started with the nasty stuff.
Oh, and the dispute that started the whole fence thing? Keep in mind my mom is a child of the Depression who does not believe in wasting money on frivolities. This four-foot wide stretch of grass between our driveways used to be full of evergreens until the neighbor started her anti-tree campaign and yanked out almost every single tree from her yard. We mowed our side, she mowed hers. Then when she cut down the trees, we would mow the whole thing when we mowed, she’d do it when she mowed, because it was silly not too. But we had our mower set to the city-recommended 3 inches, she keeps hers to golf-course level. There were several paving stones set in to allow the mailman to walk across from one yard to the next easily…my mother is a big fan of the mailman. The year that she replaced her front lawn, she also asked my mom if she could dig up the entire strip and replace it with “better grass” which she said she would maintain for us. My mom is very leery about anything that would create an easement. I didn’t live here at the time. And my mom thinks tearing out perfectly good grass was silly, so she said no. And the war was on.
The neighbor replaced the grass on her side, and pulled up the paving stones on her side. She told the mailman he couldn’t step across that two-foot section of grass…he’d have to walk down our driveway, turn and walk up hers, then back down to get to the next house, when for years he had been able to walk across all three yards easily. That infuriated my mom…she thought it was petty. Years before we had even extended the walk that led from our drive to the front steps to extend all the way across to the other neighbor’s drive, just to make it easier for the mailman. The mailman wasn’t happy either, and kept crossing the grass where the pavers had been, like every mailman we’ve had for 60 years has done…so she put up the stick and string. He stepped over. In the winter, she would purposely pile extra snow there to make it impossible for him to cross there. We would diligently shovel those four pavers up to her wall of snow! She would come out late at night with the blower and blow all the leaves off her side, back under the string to our side…for a few days until I heard her out there late at night, I was puzzled as to why the leaves didn’t fall on her side of the string…I even took pictures!
Our whole street is tree-covered…the trees were planted in a lovely straight line all down the road way back in the thirties and forties…the trees were well-established by the time we moved in in 1950-something. Huge oaks, some cherries, which the neighbors on the other side removed when they got diseased twenty five years ago. She hates trees. She loves the golf-course look. From the moment she moved in back in the mid-eighties, she has been on a mission to eliminate all the major trees in her yard. And these are huge yards…600 feet deep. She was so intent on keeping her huge backyard pristine that she never even let her dogs run loose, even though she had fenced it in. She’s take them out to do their business on the leash, then tie them up on the driveway. Which of course, puzzled my mom…why had she installed this vast expanse of chain-link that made it more difficult to mow the back yard for both of us, if she wasn’t using it to contain the dogs? Waste of money! And she cut down the beautiful wisteria that had separated our yards up by the house, so now our flower beds back up to her chainlink fence and vast expanse of concrete drive where before there was a bit of a sense of privacy. Oh, and my mom has cold frames against our garage, on the side that faces her house, that used to be shielded by wisteria. We used to garden the entire back portion of our yard…corn, tomatoes, beans, asparagus…we had a working yard and did a ton of canning. We had apple trees, pear tree, blueberries, grapes, raspberries. Nearly everyone on the street had huge back gardens once upon a time. After my dad died, and once my mom got too arthritic to keep it up, she only has vegetables in those cold frames…which aren’t pristine and tidy…tomatoes and peppers and zucchini and cucumbers sprawl and climb. The neighbor has, on one occasion, sprayed weed killer through the fence onto the grass in front of the vegetables.
This is an older, working class neighborhood in a very prosperous, even prestigious suburb full of new developments stuffed with McMansions. She has moved on to bigger and better, in her mind. She hasn’t lived in the house for nearly two years, but she still spends almost as much time over here doing yardwork as she did before, even though she has a lawn service…she doesn’t let them haul off the leaves, she dumps them on the shared approach…she won’t let them go on her precious treelawn. Now they are drifting over, starting to block our driveway. All up and down the street, the treelawns are filled with leaves waiting the city leaf-sucker…but she has little decorative chains blocking off her treelawn, and refuses to put her leaves on her grass for even a day or two. What makes this even more ironic…we have two compost piles at the back of the property for the backyard leaves, and I normally rake to the treelawn for pickup…but this year we have a landscaper doing our yard, and even though he could dump them at the treelawn, he hauls them off! (okay, full disclosure…the landscaper is my brother!) So it looks like we are spending more money for lawn service than her…so funny!
