Good Neighbors are Hard to Find, Right?

Okay, so I decide I’m sick of living in large complexes – concrete jungles that are eerily akin to penitentiaries. I find a quaint four-plex in a Mayberry-like neighborhood. Maybe there will be some elderly folks, or some artsy-fartsy types that will be so immersed in their own lives or too infirm to care about mine. On this premise, I pay my damage deposit, a ridiculous additional deposit for the two felines who dominate my life, and my first month’s rent. I write this big fat check, and hold a good thought. I must add here that the main draw for this apartment is a lovely screened-in porch, replete with wicker roll up blinds to shut out the world.

A few weeks pass with no major incidents, except that I have the odd sensation that somebody is watching me when I’m arriving home from work, or getting in my car to leave. This makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but I chalk it up to paranoia and neuroses and try to ignore it. Then one day I catch her – The Peeper, my upstairs neighbor. I wave at her to break the tension. That was, in retrospect, probably a bad mistake.

I should mention that there is a small garden directly in front of my porch, and it is The Peeper’s pride and joy. She tends it daily. I know this because I can see her through my porch blinds. This presents a dilemma: my porch is not the private sanctuary I had so hoped it would be. Pretty soon she is asking to use my bathroom so she won’t have to make that big walk upstairs to her own. Uh oh. Now that she is familiar with my doorbell, she develops a compulsion, not unlike OCD, to ring it every day, sometimes twice, to discuss the minutiae of the garden. In order to discourage these daily discussions, I tell her that the cornstalk plant smack in the middle of the garden ruins its symmetry. I tell her it looks like a phallic symbol. Despite this advice, the plant continues to reach for the sky, and her visits are starting to wear out the plastic on my doorbell. I try to empathize; her world is very, very small right now.

One day, in a moment of candor, she asks me, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m always home.” I tell her yes, I had noticed. She explains to me that she is on house arrest for having accrued three DUIs. Soon I am running to her ATM to get cash for her, undoubtedly so some other sucker can pick up beer for her (she doesn’t have the nerve to cross that line with me, I guess). I know she is fond of beer because there is usually a tall boy among the potting soil, trowels, clippers and mulch.

Life goes on like this for a while, and one day I realized I hadn’t seen her in four or five days. Being a worrier by nature, I decide to take a ride down the road to the shop where she works to make inquiries about her welfare. Her boss tells me she is incarcerated, that she showed up for a court date where they sprung a drug test on her, and apparently she hadn’t studied for it.

It’s been four months now. It’s awfully quiet upstairs, and my privacy has been restored. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I borrowed a shovel and dug up the cornstalk plant (after a respectable length of time, of course), and replaced it with a more aesthetically pleasing sago palm. I water the garden daily, in her memory, and hold a good thought for her.