Xiaoniu 小妞

Wednesday night we had our first run in with one of our neighbors. I’ll say that just about everybody in the neighborhood is excellent. Very sweet, very kind and generous people that are eager to give a wave even if they don’t know you. The people that live behind us are not part of that group.

Apparently, I offended the woman that lives behind us because I had the nerve to weed-whack the yard. She came over about 15 minutes after I went inside after doing my yard work and taking a shower. She started in on Sue until I came down to join the fun. The woman actually mistook Amy for Sue, which goes to show you how much she pays attention and interacts with us.

She started off by asking if we were “at war” with her. She seemed to think that I was purposefully making her live miserable and doing everything I could to annoy her and her family. What did I do? I finished up the weed-whacking that I started to do on Tuesday night, but had to stop since I ran out of line. I picked up more line Wednesday and finished the whacking. What she figures is that I went out of my way to wait until she had somebody over her house and then started to weed-whack just to make things difficult for her.

Then, we apparently had a “family get-together” in the back yard near our garden. What were we doing? Well, after weed-whacking I started to put up a small fence around our garden to keep the rodents out and hopefully save some of our veggies. The family get-together part must be when Amy, Sue, Emelia and James came back from their walk around the yard. They came to see how the veggies were growing. To our neighbor it must have seemed like a grande family reunion. All those people out in our yard.

Of course she didn’t stop there. She continued on to say that she could not believe that we took down the bushes in our back yard. Those overgrown, vine infested “bushes” came out last year. We’re still dealing with the vines. She implied that we took then down so that we could see them when they use their pool. Seriously.

Then she goes on to say that she can’t believe that we put in a garden in our backyard, in the place where we took out the bushes. “There of all places!” What the hell does that mean?

Her last “thought” was that we put the garden on her property. She claims that her fence is one and a half feet from the property line. Since we put our garden next to the fence we’re on her property by one and a half feet. She, “Checked with the town”. I’m not so sure myself. I know where one corner of the property is and if anything the fence is either on the line or on my side.

Not to mention the raspberry bushes that are growing immediately next to the fence were planted by the original owners of our house 40 years ago, long before she owned her house. Two other neighbors can confirm when the raspberries went in. However, the fence is much, much newer. The fence went in after the berries. I think she’s barking up the wrong tree. I’ve very tempted to spend the money to get the property lines marked out by a professional. It’ll cost me money, but it would be worth it in the end by stopping this shit now.

She finished up by saying that she wanted to put in a privacy fence, but it costs a lot of money and that she may just put up bushes instead. She said, “It isn’t that we don’t love having you as neighbors and being able to talk with you, but we don’t want to be that open.” She also said, “You must have grown up in a city to like things so open, but we bought this house in this neighborhood because we loved all of the trees.” First off, I grew up in an area more rural than this. Second, I love the trees too, but I don’t love the overgrown jungle that was allowed to grown out of hand for 30+ years.

It took me a while to really digest all of this. She brought up things that we did to our own property last year and took my weed-whacking the yard that night as a declaration of war on her family. That’s quite a stretch. If anything we are much more polite and courteous than her and her family.

Every summer her kids come home from college they spend many nights having parties in their back yard. Loud parties with plenty of screaming and rough playing in the pool. It’s loud enough where we can’t sleep with the windows open at night and they do this until 2 or 3am. Then everybody piles into cars and goes home. Lucky me has to get up 2 hours after than to start the day. But we don’t complain. They’ve had at least three of these parties this summer already and one of them was last night. Go figure.

She lets her dog loose in the neighborhood so that it can shit and piss on my lawn. We don’t say anything. They have a family reunion / graduation party last Saturday, which was the day I planned to mow, but at the time I decided to be polite and not mow next to their party. I thought that was pretty nice. The trade-off was that I had to wait until Tuesday for the rain to stop enough for me to mow (it actually ended up showering while I mowed). Then I ran out of line and had to weed-whack the following day. Why? Because the weeds were two feet high and I’m busy until Monday. The weeds can’t wait that long.

I don’t see how I’m in the wrong here. We’ve been nothing but polite and get nothing in return but crap. Despite her coming over we did our best not to stoop to her level. She made an ass out of herself and I hope she realizes it and is ashamed. No other neighbor except her has a problem with me weed-whacking my yard at 5pm on a weekday. No neighbor except her has anything to say accept praise for the work we’ve done to make the yard and house look great. Her family is the most disrespectful of others and she has the nerve to point fingers.

If I didn’t plan to spend many more years in this house I would have told her where she can shove that damn fence of hers, but I’m not going to bring myself to her level and make things worse even though it would taste so sweet. This only strengthens my opinion of her and her family. We never butted heads, but we never got along well either. I can and do talk with every other neighbor, but not them. And to think this is the same woman that brought over a plate of brownies when we moved in. I guess she was just buttering us up for years of crap that she’ll serve up. I’m just glad all the other neighbors are sane and don’t take offense to my lawn maintenance and my planting a garden on my properly (of all places).

I know this post is crap and I probably repeated myself, but I just don’t care. I’m just bitching.