What Now

MY LAWN. GET OFF IT. NO SERIOUSLY. GET OFF IT.

This is a public service message: I am within an inch of becoming the crotchety old lady who wants the neighborhood kids to stay off her lawn. One day soon, I'm going to find myself out there, resplendent in a yellow rayon mumu, sitting on a ratty old lawn chair, and threatening children with a fly swatter while screaming unintelligible obscenities at them. This is my destiny. I can feel it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to become that person, but I'm beginning to believe that I live around some of the most disrespectful people on earth and they are MAKING ME THIS WAY! See, I don't usually try to hold a lot of importance on material things. I mean, I don't want people trashing my home, of course. Stuff is just stuff and if something got damaged I might be irritated, but I don't think I'd unravel. I say all of that to you so that you realize that the way I feel now isn't a knee jerk thing. I'm simply and totally done with the jerkfaces next door treating my property without respect.

This has been going on a while. It was bad enough when we had the people next door who were obsessive about their own yard. When I say obsessive, I mean it. The dude had this fancy mower with the leaf bags attached that I swear he used every three days. He mowed his lawn in a plaid pattern! PLAID! Like a golf course is plaid. I wouldn't have been surprised to see the man down on his hands and knees measuring each blade of grass to make sure they were all the same size. He had no problem destroying our grass by letting the company who sodded his yard drive through our back yard, but he once asked Steve to sweep off his yard after Steve accidentally drove the lawnmower the wrong way and blew some grass onto his property. When that guy moved, and the new folks moved in, I was so glad to see that they were just normal yard people. However, I soon came to realize that while they weren't obsessive about their yard, that also meant that they didn't give a rat's ass about our yard either.

I'm sure I've mentioned before how when their kids were little, they'd throw toys over the fence to our dogs. That was irritating, but not a huge deal. I like to think they were just sharing with our boys. Of course, stuffed animals led to toy cars (and I swear Butler actually ate one) then to hand tools that our dogs would destroy, all the way to really large things like the netting that went around the sides of their trampoline and blankets. That's when I realized that they weren't giving things to our dogs to play with, they had turned our back yard into their personal dump. However, they were kids and kids do dumb things. I could dig that. We threw away all of the stuff they put in our backyard, didn't say anything and soon the large objects stopped getting thrown into our backyard. The junk stopped, but the trash soon appeared in our front yard. At first it wasn't a big deal, just a candy wrapper or something like that, but it got worse. I probably wouldn't have ever noticed at all, if I hadn't started accidentally hitting things with the lawn mower. It's one thing to pick up a random ice cream wrapper or the occasional chip bag. It's another thing altogether to pick up a million scraps of paper that have shot out from under the LawnBoy! I probably should have checked the side yard for debris before mowing, but I swear, I'd never see the stuff in our yard until I was right on top of it.

Here is an illustration of the problem: Please excuse the crudity of this model,
I didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it.

You can click on that to make it bigger, but that is the gist of what I'm talking about. I never see trash in their yard, only ours. I know it isn't our trash, because A) we don't eat or drink things in our side yard and B) it's just freaking THEIRS. Of course, there isn't that much stuff in our yard at a time, at least not unless I don't see the trash before I hit it with the lawn mower, and then it goes everywhere. I've also been hitting some pretty large limbs in our yard, and those are almost impossible to see if they are buried in the grass. As you can see in my drawing, we don't have a tree in that part of our yard anymore.

I know how I sound, and honestly, I realize that I shouldn't be as irritated as I am about all of this. I mean, kids are kids and they don't always think. However, it isn't just the kids, and I know this because I happened to look out of the window while the dad was mowing his lawn the other day. I kept hearing this terrible sound, but I didn't know what it was. I looked out and saw the dad pushing a lawn mower on the strip of grass next to our yard. Their giant tree (labeled Happy Tree) drops limbs and sticks like crazy and he was running over them with his push mower. I watched him as he walked around his lawn mower, picked up a big stick and tossed it into our yard. I was kind of like "What?" I know they are just sticks, but that is the base of the problem. Neighbor guy throws things he doesn't want in his own yard into ours, so I'm guessing that the kids think it's acceptable behavior. It isn't even really the sticks and the trash that make me mad. It's the fact that they seem to have no respect for our property. I'd no more throw a stick in someone's yard to get it out of my own than I would knock over someone's garbage cans. It's just trashy behavior, and that is what bothers me. I don't care if the kids come into our yard. Heck, they could have picnics and pony rides there if they wanted, as long as they clean up after themselves (and the pony) when they are done.

Of course, I'm not going to say anything because when it all boils down, it isn't a big enough deal to either embarrass or anger our neighbors. We don't really know them at all, and I don't want their opinion of me colored by a bout of hysterical weepings and raving about trash. I will continue to return the hastared soccer balls that wind up almost weekly in our back yard, and we will just keep picking up (or running over) trash that winds up in our front yard. Why? Because I'd rather not have some petty neighborhood Hatfield and McCoy type thing happen because our neighbors are slobs. I'm just going to "do unto others" on this and just complain about them on my blog! I'm allowed to do that here, right? :)

Now, I've just got to find a yellow rayon mumu and I'll be all set.