Neighborly

The dog next door is barking. The dog next door is always barking. I have actually contemplated buying a pound of raw ground beef, lacing it with rat poison, and tossing it over the fence. Except I don't throw very well and we'd probably end up with blood dripping down our side of the fence and glops of poisoned meat all over the flower beds. The thing is, I like our neighbors--the human ones. They're good-humored, good-hearted folks, just, you know, with a dog problem. So I grit my teeth and swallow hard, avoid the meat section of the supermarket, and try to focus on being thankful for my own quiet dog. He may be prone these days to bleeding and vomiting, but he's not a barker, bless him.

Plus my hunch is that the folks next door with the incredibly annoying dog often have to grit their teeth, swallow hard, and hold themselves back from sending us a nice neighborly plate of brownies flavored with arsenic. In fact, I fear that everyone on the street, or actually two streets since we occupy a corner lot, is having to do a lot of teeth-gritting and insult-swallowing these days, for we have become Bad Neighbors. More precisely, we have become The People Who Do Not Take Care of Their Yard.

I blame Keith. Now, "Blame Keith" is the default mode in most areas of my life but honestly, the yard has always been his thing. When we married, he had a condo with a small back yard, in which he'd fashioned a series of raised flower beds and vegetable plots. I had spent years as an apartment dweller, with nary a potted plant to my name. So he kept doing the gardening and lawn care, and I didn't. And when we moved to this corner house with its large front yard, side yard, and back yard, Out into the Wild he went, encircling the house with serpentine beds, laying out an enormous herb garden, experimenting with lettuce, planting perennials, grappling with ground cover, trimming, digging, culling, mulching, mincing, dicing, slicing, pruning, cultivating, and whacking away,

And then he changed jobs. And now he's far too busy, far too intellectually and emotionally and physically engaged in his work, to have time or energy or interest in the yard. And here in the semi-tropics, where plants grow several inches overnight and veritable armies of insects wage constant warfare, even a momentary lapse of attention allows nature to thrust in and take back its own. On our beautiful street, a boulevard lined with live oaks and a variety of flowering bushes that guarantee splashes of color all year round and a series of carefully cultivated lawns running in front of wooden porches, our yard stands out--and not in a good way. It's like the students who stumble into my 8:40 class at 8:55, their hair greasy and clumped, traces of last night's pizza still on their unwashed faces.

I get these moments, when I look at at the tangle out there and think, "I could do something about this. I should do something about this." And then I think, "why?" The homeowner gene seems to have passed me by. I realize I'm incredibly fortunate to own a house, but I've never found it in the least bit interesting.

So. The dog next door barks. Our weeds grow. I grit my teeth and my neighbors grit theirs. We meet periodically for drinks and remind ourselves how much we all actually like each other. And someday soon, I hope, we'll move. Maybe the new owners will be enthusiastic gardeners. Deaf enthusiastic gardeners, even. And all manner of things shall be well.