The Hovel Next-Door

Is this in our future?

In all the houses we've lived in over all the years of our marriage, my husband and I have always been good friends with our next-door neighbors. The names may have changed but the circumstances were fairly identical: The four of us socialized--seeing movies, dining out often and toasting one another on New Year's. Birthday gifts were exchanged. We offered aid in plumbing emergencies and provided chicken soup for the flu. It was grand. We enjoyed this camaraderie up until the previous occupants of the house next-door, but then they moved two hours away and you'd think we'd loaned them money. All the fun was replaced with complete silence--although they were our close friends when they were neighbors, now they're nothing.

So, still licking our wounds when the new people came along, we were hesitant to embark upon a warm and cozy relationship. Still, there they are, literally a stone's throw away. The hope exists that if and when an emergency arises, as they do out here in the country, we could count on them and they on us, but as certain elected officials have taught us all too well, hope is highly overrated.

They arrived in winter when the ground was frozen--too frozen for them to dig a hole and install their mailbox. So they stuck it in a plastic bucket, filled the bucket with rocks, and there it sat until the thaw, or so we assumed. But now it's June and the thaw has come and gone, leaving the ground soft, and there the mailbox still sits in the bucket of rocks. Finally, frustrated, Mitch brought over his post hole digger several weeks ago, along with a pineapple to sweeten the deal, assuming the young, new neighbor might have lacked one. (The tool, not the fruit.)

Today the mailbox remains in the plastic bucket, an eyesore out there on our otherwise lovely country road. "It's like the Beverly Hillbillies," our cross-the-street neighbor mutters, passing by on her daily morning walk. Another local resident, out for a jog, rolls her eyes at the offending bucket. For Maine, that's tongues wagging.

The new neighbors, who are not even so new anymore as to deserve that moniker, still have our post hole digger, and Mitch thinks maybe he should just go on over there and dig the damn hole and stick the damn mailbox in the damn ground himself, just like the neighbor on their other side, out on his riding mower one day last week, mowed their bushy front lawn. I say forget it. They are not friends, they are neighbors, and as far as I can tell, neighbors are only friends until one of you moves away. As for the mailbox, I doubt that it is hurting our property values, and if it's still there when we decide to sell, we can dig the hole before our first Open House.