My Wonderfully Weird Neighborhood

Neighborhoods can be wildly entertaining at times, you just have to be on the look out. For example, when I was a young girl living up north, we had neighbors about 3 houses down that were out of this world insane. Not kidding!

The dad ran for mayor every chance he could, which is the equivalent of me running for president, it was sad. The only votes he would get were he and his wife’s. Their 20-year-old son was a drug addict unfortunately and one day, I saw first hand what drugs can do.

I was minding my own business walking down the street to my friend’s house one day, who unfortunately for her lived next door to the weird family Robinson. All of a sudden I hear a blood-curdling scream and right as I was about to begin the holding of the breath pass the nut house as quickly as you can, the front door was thrown open and out ran the drug addict followed by his dad, who was wielding a baseball bat, and behind him was the screaming mother. I stopped dead in my tracks and hoped I’d disappear.

(Earlier that spring, a very tall ladder had been placed up on the side of their 2 story house with the hopes of some home repairs, but they never happened.)

The drug addict runs around to the back of the house where the ladder is, climbs up all the way to the roof . . . in the meantime, the wife has gone semi-catatonic in the front yard and starts grabbing invisible things out of the air as her husband is screaming every word he can think of at his son, and finally knocks the ladder down and carries it away.

When all was said and done, the son stayed on the roof for two days. It was freaking nuts, y’all. One of the neighbors called the police on day two assuming drug boy had learned his lesson. Crazy!

So, now that I’m remarried for almost 4 years, I have moved into my husband’s house, and I’m all settled in, I began to notice some weirdness around and about us.

I’ll first start with the neighbor in our cul-de-sac. I’m not sure who is sick, who is in the nursing home, who is living there, etc. but all I can say is that whoever the poor gal is . . . she can damn scream like a banshee. It is scary as hell.

One day, as I was making my way to get the mail, I hear the banshee scream from hell. It was awful and I could tell it was coming from an older woman who was probably slightly out of her mind. I detected it was coming from the house a few doors down and it was awful. I know there has been some form of a caregiver over there each day, so I wasn’t going to run over and save the screaming banshee.

It has happened about 4 more times since I have lived here and it always freaks me the hell out. I pray for whoever that is, God bless them.

I also have a neighbor who loves animals and it is not uncommon to hear her squeal talking like a chalkboard being scratched at her dog because it did a poo-poo or it peed or it licked its butt. One day, the dog had a damn professional photo shoot in the backyard, again, not kidding. It was freaking crazy.

So, in the next cul-de-sac over, a dude bought a really nicely landscaped house and then turned into the Alabama Chainsaw Massacre dude. Each night, after he moved in, I’d hear a chainsaw going on for hours. Over the weekend, it would be all damn day. Not soon after he moved in, and it happened to be a nice day for a walk, I decided to walk into his cul-de-sac just for shits and grins and oh my holy hell . . . remember that nice landscape I spoke of?

 

AFTER

 

 

 

BEFORE

 

I am not kidding, he had boxwoods, a Japanese maple I think, crape myrtles, azaleas, etc and he butchered the shit out of all of them, to the nub. It was awful. My fear is that he is having a come apart after his divorce, from what I hear, and will soon be traveling the neighborhood to groom other people’s landscape. Yay! Let’s just hope he doesn’t get a taste for human flesh.

I have another lovely older couple neighbors from another country and evidently, the dude was in some sort of military outfit where he was from as you have never seen a person with such over-erect posturing in your life. It looks like it hurts like hell but the dude won’t budge. I had a picture in my mind of him getting hit from behind by a car and instead of sailing through the air like a rag doll, he’d look like a damn rocket, straight as hell.

The third cul-de-sac on our side houses the pot house. Now, their yard hasn’t been touched in years, probably because their ungroomed sycamore tree is so dense that they have no grass in the front. The have built a privacy fenced in back deck and sometimes when I walk, I smell that nasty pot smell and hear the crazy’s out there laughing and doing whatever the hell else they do. These people are nuts and one night a few summers ago, one of the stoner dudes yelled at one of the kids that my daughter was playing with to get her to shut up, that she was laughing too much, and to throw a rock at her and he’d give him a dollar. My daughter’s friend was little and couldn’t pass up the dollar, so he threw a rock at her hitting her in the eyebrow bone and causing her a great deal of pain. Not a fun situation. I’m not fond of the stoners.

A few houses down from that is a dude that I call slick Rick. Slick Rick, at one time, was a desperate newly divorced dude who insisted on picking up the ladies, ie. his son’s friend’s mothers, by walking around the front yard topless, shoeless, and wearing only way to short cut off blue jeans. When he caught word that a mom was coming to pick up his son’s friend, by golly, this dude would tear the clothes off he was wearing and don his pick up the soccer moms outfit. I happened to be a victim one day and I have to tell you that I threw up in my mouth a little as he sashayed his way up to my car, put his arms up on top of the car, leaned in, and just stared at me. The next thing I knew, his son had walked up behind him and said, “Dad, leave Sharon alone, she’s in a relationship and she’s not interested.” Aw, out of the mouth of babes.

Probably one of the most interesting people in our neighborhood, though I haven’t seen her in awhile, is the recycling pick pocketer.

Wielding her Target bags, she goes along on Monday’s and picks her way through everybody’s recycling before the truck has come, pulling out cans, etc to take and get money for. Here’s the weirdness . . .

This woman and her husband live in a $500,000 house, drives some sort of fancy Cadillac, and she weighs about 52 pounds. Now, maybe the house and the car did them in and they can’t eat and this is what she has become, but it is really stinking weird.

Well, anyway, I love my neighborhood and all the weirdness that is bundled right up in it. I find it all quite fascinating and entertaining and its beats the expense of going to the movies. There are some days, honest to God, I get a bag chair, open it up, and just sit in my driveway with my drink and a snack, waiting to see what’s next.

Love y’all!!♥