Good Fences & Crazy Neighbors: Suburban Drama, Flowerbeds & Vicious Dog Accusations

🏡 Read “The Time I Accidentally Became the Suburban Drug Kingpin” on Medium

🧠 People Are Crazy (And That’s Not New)

There’s a song that says:
God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.
I’ve always agreed with that last part. People are crazy. I’ve spent most of my life believing people are basically good, everyone’s got something to offer if you give them a chance. And mostly, that worked.

Sure, there were a few folks I could take or leave. But even they had some redeeming quality… just maybe not one I needed in my life.

🏡 The Block Party We Never Attended

We lived at that house for several years before moving out in 2014. We weren’t exactly the social butterflies of the neighborhood. We never attended the infamous block party next door. I’m sure some of the neighbors assumed we were anti-social. That was fine by me.

No one knocking to borrow sugar, no one wanting to use the swimming pool: I call that peace and quiet.

🌼 Flowerbeds and Hurt Feelings

When we bought the house, the yard was bare. No landscaping, which suited me perfectly. I even joked to the neighbor that I was glad the flowerbeds on the property line were hers, yardwork wasn’t really my thing.

Apparently, she filed that comment away for future reference.

Over the years, my husband and son built a few planters. We planted flowers, and plenty of weeds. I usually got roped into weeding under mild protest. I love looking at flowers; I just don’t want to work for them.

And yet, those planters somehow became offensive. My neighbor saw them as a betrayal of my original stance on yardwork, as if garden preferences came with a lifetime contract.

Ten years ago, I also didn’t drink Diet Coke or use wrinkle cream. People change. I even once ran a 5K, though it was more Phoebe Buffay than Olympian.

🐶 The Day the Dog Drama Began

One day, her tiny dog was found dead in our yard. It had been shot. We were the ones who discovered it, informed her, and offered condolences. If I’d shot it, I probably wouldn’t have invited them over to collect the poor thing. But logic wasn’t exactly thriving on our block.

For years, I kept telling my family:
Let it go. Don’t engage. Don’t feed the crazy.

And mostly, we managed to stay out of it.
Until we couldn’t.

💊 Suddenly, I’m a Drug Kingpin?

Robert Frost wrote:
“Good fences make good neighbors.”

Apparently, ours wasn’t tall enough.

One day, I found out (directly, no less) that I was officially considered the biggest drug dealer on the block. Yes, according to my neighbor, the fact that we had a fence and a security system automatically made me some kind of suburban cartel boss.

If that were true, I wouldn’t have still been driving my beat-up 1997 Nissan Sentra with 300,000 miles, four accidents, held together mostly by prayer and duct tape. I would’ve at least sprung for something that could outrun the cops.

⚠️ Enter: The Vicious Dog Accusation

Then came the final act.

Our boxer/lab mix slipped his dog run one afternoon. My neighbor, self-certified in “vicious dog training,”  called the cops, claiming our dog had attacked her tiny one. Animal control showed up, and we were issued a citation for having a vicious dog. She told them it was a pit bull.

For the record: if your “vicious dog training” can’t tell a pit bull from a lab, you might need a refresher.

The officer was polite. I was mortified.

🔚 Good Fences Didn’t Work

Looking back, I probably should’ve seen it coming. The gloves eventually came off. The fence didn’t make good neighbors, it just gave them something to peer over (and through when we were playing in the pool #creeper).

Robert Frost was right about one thing in The Mending Wall:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

In our old neighborhood, that “something” was good old-fashioned drama.

Vicky’s View — where life always seems to offer new material.