Beware of The Neighbors

                                  Gordon Studer

Even though my husband and I live in what is surely the best home we will ever occupy, set on two acres of beautiful woods in which our cats can ramble, and with a generous vegetable garden and several blooming flower beds and fruit trees, we are considering moving, and here's why: It's boring. Nothing ever happens in Freeport, Maine, unless you count a boot sale at L. L. Bean's as something. And the neighbors: yawn city.

I might be spoiled, since I've had some wild neighbors in the past. Most memorable were Billy and Sis, teenagers who lived next door when I was a toddler. Sis was our baby-sitter and I liked her quite a bit. Her parents were nice enough, but she and her brother fought constantly, screaming and name-calling at all hours. Then one relatively calm Sunday afternoon, Billy shot Sis dead. In the garage. With a rifle. I can still hear my grandfather mumbling, "Oy vey is meir, Gut in Himmel," which loosely translated meant, "For this I left Brooklyn?"

In need of a new baby-sitter, we moved. Our new neighbors were three agoraphobic spinster sisters my mother dubbed The Witches Next Door. They hated us, and with good reason. After all, I was a child. And my sister was also a child. Adding insult to injury, we got a dog. Having tolerated our bicycles in the front yard and a kiddie pool in the back, the dog was the final straw. The Witches sprang into action, sprinkling toxic pesticides and bits of meat on their lawn adjacent to our driveway. Caesar spent a month at the vet's. Once back home he was never the same, refusing to go outside. (This was a drag, which you know if you've ever tried getting a boxer to use a litter box.)

Directly across the street lived a childless couple who I suspected at one time had kids but had led them into the forest to be eaten by wolves, or possibly had eaten them themselves. One Halloween, in response to a group of us excitedly ringing their doorbell and shouting, "Trick or treat," the old man stormed out brandishing a rifle and shouting obscenities. He was not in costume.

In adulthood I've coexisted with the hideous paint job (fluorescent yellow with blood-red trim) visible from every one of my windows, the one neighbor's wife fooling around with another one's husband (and can I tell you everything?) situation, the teenagers playing basketball long into the night (thump, thump, thump) directly across the street, except when they were busy gunning their ear-splitting jalopies past my bedroom window, and the nagging mother who lived behind us constantly shouting, "Alexander, get in here right now!" (We always wondered where Alexander was and why he had to get in there.)

"Oh, lighten up," you're thinking. "Move to the country." Well, we did, and it's kind of like living in a cemetery. Nothing happens, except for a few dog-walkers passing by several times a day like the Gestapo on patrol. It's become obvious we need more. Or at least different.