Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Nosy Nelly

Does anyone else love spying on their neighbors? I use the word spy in a loose sense. What I'm talking about is fascination with neighbors that results in excessive curiosity. Does anyone else experience this?

When I was a kid, there was a family that lived behind us who did the weirdest things. My mom and I would creepily watch them out the windows and talk and talk about what they were up to. For instance, instead of walking their dog in the summer, they would let him out into the yard and then stand on the deck with a mirror so the dog could chase the sun's rays reflecting off the mirror. Or, they wouldn't cut their grass for 4-5 weeks in the summer and then the husband would come out on the hottest day of the year at 2:00 P.M. in sweatpants and a sweatshirt to cut it. It would take hours because the grass was so long and he looked like he was going to have a heart attack. They were strange.

Now that I'm in my own house, I've found my fascination with neighbors is still enthusiastic. Just a few weeks ago a neighbor sent out an email to the association asking for realtor recommendations because he was moving. That was all the email said. This is a guy who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years and who was always out working in his yard. Since the email has come out, we haven't seen him once and his house isn't on the market yet. We haven't seen his dog either, which is weird because his dog is always outside. It's caused me great concern.

Also recently, there was a moving truck at another neighbor's home. We think that the couple split up and the woman moved out. The woman had an evil Siberian Husky with great rage in his heart for Kirby. Once, when Kirby was on a walk and the woman came to pet him, the husky actually pushed his way through the window screen and came running at Kirby. So, I'm not very sad that the husky is gone. I am, however, curious about what happened between the two people. The couple used to be really friendly with us, but in recent months the guy wouldn't even look in our direction when he was walking past. I kept thinking "What did we do?", but now I'm wondering if he was just in a dark place because of his relationship (and also probably the husky).

Snooping on your neighbors makes me feel like I'm living in the 1800's and am all "Why I do declare, Mr. Jones was drunk in his yard in his knickers last night looking for his cat." I love it. Does that make me a bad person?

3 comments:

Grace said...

I feel the same way about neighbors. I'm also wondering about them, I think it's because you are in such close proximity and somewhat know stuff about them -- but in reality there's a lot you don't know. But I'll def. keep tabs on who our one neighbor is dating by the type of car parked outside our house, or look up how much people paid for their houses, you know stuff like that.

Grace said...

Edit: cars parked outside her house.

Anonymous said...

I know exactly who you are talking about. We especially liked how after I had a 4 season porch built on the back of our house, they built a 4 season porch on the back of their house. I think they liked my idea!

My favorite part, though, was how I called the city on him for dropping his smelly grass clippings by the trash barrel at the end of his property right by my garage. After smelling the grass decay over a period of a couple weeks, I finally called the city. A week or two later, we saw someone down by the smelly pile with the neighbor pointing and talking. The following weekend, he was outside loading the grass clippings into his truck. He never did that again!

Those were the good old days....

Love ya,
Mom