There’s a song that says, “God is great, beer is good and people are crazy.” I can agree that people are crazy. I’ve always operated on the concept that all people are basically good. Everybody has something to offer if you will just give them a chance. Overall, that’s worked for me. I’ve met a few people that I could take or leave but not any that I just plain didn’t like–and even those had something positive to offer, just not to me.

It’s been several years that we have lived at our current address. We aren’t the most social people on our block and we have never attended the “block” party. The “block” party has always been held at our next door neighbor’s house. I suppose some of our neighbors think we are just anti-social; however, that was fine with me. It meant nobody knocked on my door asking to borrow sugar or to use the swimming pool.

We purchased this house around 10 years ago. It didn’t have any landscaping at the time and that was fine with me also. I even mentioned to our neighbor that I was glad that the flowerbeds bordering the property were hers as keeping up with them wasn’t my cup of tea. Apparently she took this to heart. Over the years my husband and son have built several planters and we have flowers. To be truthful, we have mostly weeds and I usually am pulled into working on them reluctantly. I like the flowers and love them to be pretty, I just don’t want to work in the garden. Recently, I found out that it offended my neighbor because we have planters. The offense was taken because I had said that wasn’t my cup of tea 10 years earlier. Who knew. Ten years ago I also didn’t drink diet coke or use anti-wrinkle cream either.

I also recently found out that I had killed my neighbors’ tiny dog. It had a gun shot wound. Interesting. Admittedly, it was found dead in my yard and we kindly went to let them know about it. I’m not sure that I would have told them it was dead and let them come to pick it up if I had shot it, but oh well.

Different things have happened over the years and I’ve always admonished my family to just let it go. Ignore it, don’t let it get to you because they are looking for a reaction. However, this last incident has gotten my blood boiling. I’m still holding my tongue but it’s taking tremendous effort.

Robert Frost wrote a poem that says, good fences good neighbors make. Obviously our fence is not tall or long enough to make a good neighbor. In fact, because I have a fence and a security system, I’m the (and this is a direct quote) biggest drug dealer on the block. Wow. If that were so, I would not be driving a 1997, four times wrecked, 300k miles, Sentra. I would at least have a vehicle that could out run any police officers!

A few weeks ago our boxer/lab mix dog got off his dog run. At night, he’s in our home but during the day I clip him outside. My neighbor (who says she has had vicious dog training) called the cops because our dog attacked her little tiny dog. Since then, animal control has issued me a citation of a vicious dog. She told them it was a pit bull. That’s some vicious dog training when you can’t tell a pit bull from a lab. The officer was very apologetic that they had to come out. I felt sorry for him — and for me.

At any rate, I’m past the ignore it and it’ll go away stage. The gloves are off. My fence didn’t make any good neighbors and there really are some crazy people out there.

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Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors”.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”