22) Fences Make Good Neighbors

“Hey… excuse me? Yes, Yeah… Hi…” you call up to the woman parking her car in your yard again. This is the first time that you’ve actually been able to see who the person was. Every other time you’d come out to a car (one of many) that had been parked in your yard… and when you’d walk over to one of the neighboring houses (you were never sure which car belonged to whom in which house) to politely ask them to move, no one would ever answer the doors.

It wasn’t that you took issue per se’ with people parking in your yard, it was more the annoyance of not being able to park your own car in your own driveway. Then there was the issue of all the equipment and dumpster rentals… having a slew of other people’s vehicles in your yard made any type of work that much more difficult. The last thing you wanted to worry about was putting a 2x4 through a neighbor’s car window as you loaded up a dumpster.

You just could never seem to ‘catch’ the parkers as they were parking but you also weren’t the type of asshole who would start having your neighbors’ cars towed. That wasn’t the ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ look you were going for. Besides… you could understand that your yard had basically served as a parking lot while the church sat unoccupied for nearly a decade. Still though… not being able to get your moving truck in on day one… hadn’t been the ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ you were hoping for either.

Now, you had her. “Yes, uh hi… I’m your neighbor Vanessa, we bought the church. We’re asking that no one parks here anymore…”

“Well I’ve always parked here,” she cuts you off.

“And I completely understand that on account of the property being vacant for so long but…”

“I’m pretty sure that this spot here is part of this house,” she says pointing to your neighbor’s house. You’re also pretty sure that she isn’t your neighbor, just a regular visitor.

“Yeah, no… we have the survey inside, we’re putting a fence up… and I promise you, this isn’t the neighbor’s yard…”

“Well we’ve always parked here!” She’s halfway out of her car, looking annoyed at you for having to play parking police.

“And I do understand that… however we are doing a lot of work on the property, have equipment rentals in and out all the time and I don’t want to have to worry about messing up anyone’s car…”

She rolls her eyes and sighs loudly, “FINE! I’ll move it.” Then she hops back into her car and backs out of the driveway, before pulling into a spot just a little ways up the road.

“I don’t even know why the fuck I explain myself. ‘NO’ is a complete fucking sentence, Vanessa,” you say to both Jackie and yourself.

Jackie takes a drag on her joint and slowly exhales. “Yeah, it is a bit ridiculous that no one seems to know where the property lines are…”

“I’m honestly not trying to be a shit head but I’m getting so tired of trying to figure out which car belongs to whom, only to go door to door like the people pleasing jackass I am, with no one answering and me then having to hike over to the parking lot across the street to park… when I have my own spot… that I can’t even use…. Right here…”

Jackie nods in agreement.

You pull on your joint, the warm thick air filling your very being, the tinge of something new, slightly acidic, maybe it’s the papers? You like it though neither Jackie or David have noticed the taste. “I don’t think I’m the asshole here.” You’re convincing yourself while low key asking for reassurance.

“Ummmm no. You’re not. It’s your property Vaness. I wouldn’t want the liabilty of having the entire neighborhood parking in my yard at any point, let alone when I’m doing construction on the property. You were perfectly nice and reasonable about the whole thing and if anyone takes issue with that… it’s not your problem.”

“Yeah… I know… I just hate being the bad guy, ya know?”

“Well asking people to not park in your yard is hardly being ‘the bad guy;”

“I guess. I still just feel like a jerk but then I get mad at myself for being a pushover… ya know?” You take another drag before releasing, Jackie nods her head in understanding, “Like I was explicitly clear about the no parking thing with all the neighbors and then the one guy Don fucking got me with the whole… but ‘we have an infant and it’s hard for my wife to carry the baby into the house from the parking lot across the street’ on Tuesday nights when the street sweeper comes through’ and everyone needs to be off the street and so next thing you know, I fucking relent, because of course I do, and allow them to park there Tuesday nights…”

Jackie stares at the street in front of you.

“Only to find out that they don’t have an infant… I see the ‘baby’ they have running all over the place. The kid is probably five fucking years old. Half the time I don’t know if I have ‘sucker’ or ‘asshole’ written on my forehead,” you’re laughing now.

“You’re just nice. That’s all.”

“Well you know what they say about ‘nice guys’ right?”

“That they finish last?”

“That everyone gets to park on their fucking driveway while they park in the lot across the street.”

You’re both laughing now.

******************************************

“Hey Vaness, did you see the belfry?” David asks.

You’re in the front yard on your way around the building and into the kitchen to see if you left your water bottle down there. Losing things in a nearly 7,000 square foot building where nothing currently has a home, has become a constant and daily struggle for all of you. Outside there’s now a large stack of weather beaten, moldy plywood resting along the front side of the house, it hadn’t been there earlier.

“Huh?” You’re suddenly worried that aside from the basement with all of its fuckery, that maybe something is wrong with the belfry too.

“I took all the boards off the belfry’s openings. Check it out, it looks so much better.”

Shielding your eyes, you look up and notice that the wood is gone. There had been several sheets of the wood up in the openings when you bought the place. It didn’t look good and now… it looked much better.

“WOW!” You exclaim. “I need to go across the street to really see it!” You turn and look both ways before running across the road so that you can get a better look at the majestic tower without the ugly boarded up openings. You take it all in. What a difference! “This looks so good!” You tell David who has walked across the street to join you. “Nice job!” You add.

He smiles, “Thank you.”

******************************************

Later that day you’re heading to the bathroom, walking up the stairs from the basement. You and Jackie have been working on more demo. She and David had just about filled up the massive dumpster in the yard. They managed to move the old left behind bureau that had sat above what is now the floor pit and to somehow drag it up and into the dumpster. It was incredibly heavy, you were all shocked it hadn’t fallen through the rotten floor joists. Most of what was in there now was the old moldy framing from the basement walls, the bureau, some of the last remaining moldy plywood and a bit of insulation. Jackie and David had carefully loaded the dumpster as TJ, the man who’s been renting them to you, had made it very clear that “NOTHING can sit above the dumpster’s sides when I pick it up.” He had really stressed the NOTHING part and David had even reminded you. That definitely made things a bit more tedious, but so far the three of you had done a good job of keeping everything well within the dumpster’s footprint.

You see the red truck coming up around the south side of the church. The driver was going slow… “Another looky-Lou,” you thought to yourself. There had been so many people stopping at the intersection, driving by slowly, some even idling, others stopping to ask you what you were doing, many people even thanking you profusely for fixing up your “house”. That had been weird, all the people wanting to thank you for working on your own property.

Now the man in the red pickup truck stopped at the intersection, you can see him clearly from David’s office window, and he’s looking the building up and down, his eyes zeroing in on the plywood leaning up against the church’s front wall. Next thing you knew, and you had a feeling this was coming, he pulls up along the front of the church, parks the truck and hops out. He catches David who just happens to be out front getting ready to walk inside and the two of them start talking.

By the time you finish up in the bathroom and head back downstairs David is coming up. “What was that about?” You ask David, referring to the conversation he had just had with the red truck guy.

“Oh. Yeah he had asked what we were doing with the old belfry plywood, I told him we were going to get rid of it and he asked if he could have it. I told him he could and he said that he’d be back after work later today to come pick it up.”

“That plywood didn’t look to be in that bad of shape. We can’t salvage it??” You ask your husband.

“No Vaness, it was pretty moldy and beaten up. He’s doing us a favor, less shit we have to figure out how to stack in the dumpster.”

You nod your head in resolution and continue going about your day. You’re surprised when you and David walk back inside later that night that the plywood is still up against the church’s wall. “I’m shocked he never came back.” You said to your husband.

He shrugs, “Maybe he forgot or had a rough day at work. I’m sure he’ll be back tomorrow.”

You didn’t think too much of that until you were woken by what sounded like something smashing into metal. You checked your phone, it was nearly midnight and there was that sound again. You hopped out of bed and peeked out the window, there was what looked like the red truck, all the plywood from the belfry loaded up in the bed but you couldn’t see the driver. CLANG. Rubbing your sleepy eyes you shuffled into the bathroom to get a better view of the dumpster… The truck’s driver had opened up the back of the dumpster, climbed in and was tossing everything around, looking for god only knew what, everything in that dumpster had been in awful shape. You were the “salvage queen,” tossing anything with any life left went against every fiber in your being… now this guy was wading through a bio hazard of moldy wood and he wasn’t being neat or quiet about it. “Jesus-fucking-Christ… give a man some plywood… and then he’ll want the moldy wood…” you say out loud (referencing the Give a Mouse a Cookie book that your kids loved so much).

The red truck guy had a flashlight and was tossing everything around. The neatly piled dumpster was a wreck, wood that had been carefully stacked inside to fit within the dumpster’s footprint was now strewn about towering well above the dumpster’s walls. “Un-fucking- real,” you say to yourself, then louder to David, “He hun…”

“Yeah,” he groans from the bedroom. He’s always been a light sleeper.

“Your plywood pal apparently neglected to tell us that he gets out of work close to midnight and well… now he’s waist deep in our dumpster throwing everything all over the place.”

“Are you kidding me right now? WHAT time is it?” He doesn’t sound nearly as groggy.

“Well when I checked my phone, it was just about midnight.”

“Jesus Christ,” he says pulling his pajama pants on and grabbing a tshirt. “I’ll be right back.”

When he finally comes back to bed you were already asleep.

*************************************************

“Well this fucking sucks,” Jackie says.

You were both standing in front of the dumpster, the dumpster’s back gate now wide open, no longer able to close on account of the red truck guy carelessly tossing everything around. Boards soared well past the dumpster’s walls. The heavy old bureau was wedged awkwardly among all the debris.

“I just don’t understand how, ‘you can have the plywood right here,’ meaning the pieces David had neatly stacked against the church wall had somehow turned into, ‘yeah sure, you can come onto our property, ransack the dumpster, make a massive mess’, and…”

“Do it at midnight?!” Jackie finished for you.

“Right??? After work…! Pffft…! Hey buddy, if you get out of work that late, that would have been nice to give us the head’s up… I feel like that’s kind of pertinent to the whole thing…”

“Tell me about it,” Jackie sighs. “Then again boundaries seem a bit off here.”

“You mean like just walking into people’s homes?” You ask.

“Yeah. How many people have just walked in at this point?”

“Are we including delivery drivers too?”

“Sure.”

“Well then honestly I’ve lost count. It’s been a lot. Wild how everyone just comes in huh?”

Jackie laughs. It’s hot outside, even this early in the morning. You’re actually surprised at just how hot it’s been. “Here, this is for you,” she passes you a neatly rolled joint. “Smoke? Then we’ll take care of this dumpster shit?”

“Yes please!”

“I just don’t understand,” you’re both sitting in the shade on the lawn in the two folding chairs you had carried outside, “why anyone would think it’s ok to come back here and make that kind of racket close to midnight, leave a massive mess… and completely neglect to tell us that he gets off of work that late… or even to come into the yard, open up the fucking dumpster and start tossing everything around. You guys had that thing fucking Tetris-ed in there and now we have to spend a good chunk of our day cleaning this shit up. I wish I knew where he lived so I could go wake him up to come help clean HIS mess.”

You both laugh at that last part.

“AND HERE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING US BY GIVING US LESS WORK!” You snort, “So much for that shit.”

David walked around the front of the house and surveyed the dumpster. He shook his head in disgust, what a mess… He walked to the back of it and tried to close the dumpster’s back gate.

“It won’t close,” Jackie yells up from the backyard where the two of you had just finished your break, “we already tried.”

“I guess we’ll add cleaning up this shit to today’s to do list then, huh?” He said. You picked up on the annoyance in his voice.

“We’ll take care of it,” you offer.

“Thanks,” he shakes his head at the whole ordeal and begins to walk off, onto another project when he turns to add, “Did I mention that I CAN NOT wait to put a fence up?”

He had. Numerous times. Even before you all had even moved in. The fence and his workshop that he wanted to add came up quite frequently.

“Fences make good neighbors,” you offer as you and Jackie put your workgloves on and started the day cleaning up red truck guy’s heaping mess.

“Tell me about it,” David says.

The belfry with the wood removed from the openings. The ground below was where the wood had been neatly placed.