Someone needs to get a life

The fire captain just stopped by. He's a friend of ours. He stopped as a favor to us to give us a heads up instead of going through official channels and writing a citation. Apparently someone called and complained about our yard. Not one of our neighbors. Just someone who lives nearby and drives down our street regularly. They complained that we had trash in the back of our pick up truck and trash in our driveway.

Yes. We have "trash" in our pick up truck. The pick up truck that is parked quietly under a tree in our side yard. It doesn't have garbage in it like bags of rotten kitchen trash or black plastic bags or anything. That goes in our garbage can and gets picked up weekly. It doesn't smell or collect flies. It has lawn and tree clippings and at the moment an old broken lawn chair. We fill it up and then we take it to the dump on a regular basis. We've been doing it for the twelve years we've lived here.

And our driveway has a few things stacked on the edge of the pavement up against a retaining wall. You can't even see it unless you look really fast between the time the car in the driveway blocks your view and the retaining wall on the other side blocks your view. And it's not garbage either. It's neatly stacked tiles and a small box of metal shelving bits and small metal shelf laying on it's side. I dragged a box of rags out of the garage a few weeks ago and that's sitting behind the car at the moment. But you can't see it and the plan wasn't to leave that out there for years. I took it out to get to something behind it and I keep forgetting it's there. BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING SEE IT! Jeff put a couple of flattened cardboard boxes out there by the trash can a few days ago. Those are visible to the street. It's to go in the recycling which hasn't come yet this week. I guess that was the last straw for someone, eh? A couple of flat cardboard boxes.

You have to understand that we don't live in one of those fancy tract neighborhoods with codes and covenants. I wouldn't be caught dead living in one of those sterile places!! But hey, if you want your neighborhood to look all cookie cutter perfect and boring, live someplace like that. More power to you. Or, if you're forced by circumstances to live in a place like that then, you have my sympathies. (Kristen - I LOVE YOU! I don't hold it against you that you live in a gated community. Honest!)

However, this is an old neighborhood that has a hodge podge of housing styles built over the last 100 years. No one has "landscaping". Instead, everyone has old lady wire fences and wooden gates that hang crooked and ancient fruit trees that drop fruit on the sidewalks and shade trees that are overgrown and too close to the house or the street. We have barky dogs and clotheslines and kids running around and riding bikes without helmets (while the police look the other way.) And gardens - real flower gardens and vegetable gardens in front yards and side yards. Instead of some pruned juniper or weed free patch of green, yards in our neighborhood have rows of garlic and overgrown rose bushes and hedges of lilacs and tomato vines in wire cages along the side of their house. People have woodstoves scenting the air and barrels that they burn stuff in the backyard in and pick up trucks and RV's parked in sight. They have odd add ons to their houses and woodpiles stacked high. People have whirligigs and Marine flags flying and arbors and garages painted a different color than their house. We have fake wooden wishing wells and windmills that clatter and and plastic deer and racks of antlers nailed above the garage door. And live deer that eat your plants. And quail that scurry and owls that hoot and songbirds that sing. We have sidewalks that stop and start and in a few places lurch and tilt and crumble. We have empty dirt lots and even a few cars parked in yards that clearly haven't run in years. This is not fucking Beverly Hills. And I love every odd, eclectic square foot of it.

Hey, if I wanted, I could walk down my street and find something to complain about in each and every yard I see. Well, except for our immediate neighbors George and Norma. Who have a beautiful, picture perfect yard. And are the sweetest neighbors ever. And they, of all people, would have the only legitimate reason to complain because their kitchen window looks directly into our backyard, which is often in a state of transistion and horrible disarray. But they don't say a thing, which is so completely gracious of them and wins them double karma points. And they love my big ol' dog even though he barks sometimes (though not a lot - and definitely not as much as a lot of other dogs on our street). And they bring me peaches from their tree. But I digress.

So. Jeff went out and covered the back of the pick up bed with a tarp. And he moved the cardboard. I'll move the tile and shelving into the back yard until I can install them in the garage where they're planned to be. But it pisses me off that someone will drive by and see the "mess" cleaned up and feel smug and vindicated. It bugs me that someone has so little to do with their life that they worry about our yard. As they're driving by.

The irony is that we get people all the time, complete strangers, who stop by to talk to me about the yard. At least a handful of folks each year stop and knock on our door just to say how much they love driving or walking by our house and how pretty all our flower gardens are and how much they enjoy seeing our family playing in the yard and even, though Jeff said it would be a bad thing, how much they like seeing the peace flag we have flying. (Had flying - it's disappeared - it ripped and I think it just finally blew away) So I know that we aren't offending the entire population of Susanville with our pick up truck full of tree branches and our evil cardboard. We're just offending one someone who has nothing better to do than worry and nitpick about something stupid. Fucking a-hole.

Sorry. It just bugged me. I'm done venting now.