Never let it be said that my husband doesn’t have all his shit in one sack.
Having one’s excrement in a single flexible container is apparently of supreme importance in the U.S. military. Joe has been out of the Navy for 20 years, but the more colorful aspects of his service live on in scatological references and oft-repeated stories (under no circumstances should anyone ever ask about “that night in Manila”).
Unfortunately, at this moment, the reference is literal. Joe is cleaning the backyard of dog waste in preparation for planting—or rehoming—a full hedge of ligustrum bushes. A friend kindly offered the bushes, which need to be removed so he can build an addition to his house, after Joe told the sorry tale of our psycho-bitch-from-hell backyard neighbor. Joe was contemplating adding a spiral of razor wire atop our six-foot “privacy” fence until Sally reminded him that squirrels use to the fence as an elevated expressway to get from one tree to the next. “You can’t hurt the squirrels Daddy.” Her admonition—which curiously had much more resonance than my reminder of the Homeowner Association covenants—sent him in search of alternative ways to create a more effective barrier between our tiny backyard and Bitchzilla’s.
Apparently, our neighbor—we’ll just call her Bitch for short—thinks we’re too loud. In truth, we are a family “of volume.” However, our booming voices rarely can be heard after 11 p.m. and it’s been many months since we could afford a dinner party or any other merriment that might include serious drinking and loud, backslapping tales. Our adult son uses the front door, being past the age when he had to slip out his back bedroom window to meet his friends (did he really think we didn’t notice that window screen propped against the house?).
Her first serious salvo came a month ago in the form of a 9:30 p.m. call to see if everything was “all right.” At approximately 9:10 p.m., Joe made a particularly bad blunder in his online golf game and exclaimed “Oh no!” He was sitting on the lanai at the time. I heard him from inside the house and I’m pretty sure anyone on the block who happened to be sitting on their lanai at that hour also heard him. However, one non-profane exclamation at just-past-nine does not, in my mind, a nuisance make. Our neighbor apparently thought differently. She called, as mentioned, at 9:30 p.m.—a full 20 minutes after the exclamation—and asked “Is everything all right? I heard someone scream and I wanted to make sure you didn’t need assistance.” I thanked her for her concern, explained the yell and apologized for disturbing her. (Of course, if Joe actually had been having a heart attack or confronting a gunman, he would have been dead by the time she called.) She took the opportunity to lament our tiny lots and close-together houses and the fact that one can hear “everything.” She lingered over the word everything, which caused me to make a mental note to stop calling my sister from the lanai, but otherwise, no red flags.
That is, until two police officers showed up at our door this morning while I was making breakfast. As I stood there in my housefrau robe with a spatula in my hand, they explained that our noisy, late-night boisterousness was causing a problem in the neighborhood. I just stared blankly. I saw the female cop give me, in my frumpy middle-aged glory, the once-over and then check the address. “Uh, apparently your neighbor thinks you’ve been too loud,” she said slowly. “Do keep the TV turned up loud?” She was quickly getting the message that we weren’t a rock band, cheerleaders, sadists, or even particularly interesting. I think I stuttered something about leaving the back door open to get fresh air, but mostly I just stared at them. The male officer closed his notebook, scratched his chiseled chin and said “Ok then, have a nice day.”
I was still watching them walk to their patrol car when Mara, the woman who lives across the street and a former neighborhood association president, came tearing into my yard. “I heard them,” she said. “Did that crazy lady call the cops on you? She had them at Tommy’s house last week complaining about his dog barking. Old Ruffy is 13 years old, blind and deaf. I don’t even think he can bark.” I cleared my throat and asked Mara how she knew the police had been beckoned by my backyard neighbor. “Oh, she bitches about you guys all the time! She especially hates that Joe goes on the porch every morning and clears his throat for 10 minutes. You know, she put a motion detector in her backyard.”
I think it was the motion detector that did it. When Joe returned from walking the dog, I told him all he’d missed. Once he’d been dissuaded from a) confronting Bitch, b)buying a bullhorn, c)reviving his college garage band, or d) putting up razor wire, he opted for a three foot deep, seven foot high hedge between us and them. The hedge will make our tiny yard even tinier, but that should make it easier for Joe to keep all his shit in one sack.
