think? panic. On this block where everything is so geometrically neat (every hedge, even the garbage cans along the curb are precisely horizontal), I was gripped with fear. They were throwing us a party, and we were sullying their perfect neighborhood. We stuck out, worse than a sore thumb. We were a dirty thumb. All the other houses dwarfed ours, and we had our own trash mountain, like it was Appalachia. Plus, Doug hadn’t even set up the big trash pickup yet. He told me not to worry, he’d handle everything, but how could I not worry? Given
