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2002-07-05 - 9:28 a.m.

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

The heat has broken. I�m out of the house again. This morning, I celebrated by taking a bicycle ride around the neighborhood to see what had changed in the last week. Not surprisingly, most of the changes are small. My flowerbed with the geraniums, the one I don�t really look at unless I�m headed toward the back of the house, is over-run with thistles. Someone in town to my south has a new mailbox. Little things. One change, however, is large and not for the better: it appears I no longer live next to a rental house.

Most suburbanites hate living next to rental houses. You never know who will move in. You never know whether they will take care of the property. But we are worse about our yard than most in the area and most of the renters have been better than we are. One former rental neighbor even came over and asked if he could trim our bushes on his side because they were bothering him. I came out and he and I trimmed them together.

Our experience have been different. Over the years, we have had primarily wonderful neighbors over there. One young couple acted as back-up, just in case I had an emergency and didn�t make it home when the kids got off the school bus (as happened once when there was a big accident on the freeway.) Two young men helped us as we helped them after the big flood of 1997. One, the bush trimmer, chatted, taught me about a lot about gardening (which I promptly forgot but that wasn�t the bush trimmer�s fault.)

One, a woman with several very nice children, moved out quickly but I didn�t blame her. The people on the block could not seem to convince the local police not to keep stopping her twelve-year-old son to check what he was doing in the neighborhood (which clearly was harassment. It�s a small town. There are not that many black families. Those officers KNEW he lived in the neighborhood.) She moved from fear that her son would lose patience and then there would be a big problem.

So why would a new neighbor, the owner, be a problem? Well, we�ve lived next to him before he moved out and started renting the place. The man is crazy. He once tried to stop us from trimming bushes on our property. He admitted the bushes were on our property. He just didn�t want them trimmed. He asks for free legal advice on such topics as real estate. When we explain that neither of us has much knowledge about real estate law, he gets huffy. If he asks a legal question we can answer, he usually gets angry because the answer was not what he hoped for. The last time he lived here, it got to the point that when we saw him coming, we ducked into the house. It didn�t help. He rang the doorbell.

Will his presence destroy the neighborhood? No, he�s not that intrusive or powerful. He�s just a bit odd and annoying. Still, I had been looking forward to a new set of neighbors because most of the renters have been lovely people. Instead, it�s back to the future.

Good neighbors are a wonderful thing. We have several of them. Bad neighbors are hell. We don�t have any. We just have an annoying one when we were hoping for better. Things could be much, much worse.

But still, I was hoping.....

LAST YEAR: The Black Hole

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