An Old Guy Remembers His Neighbors...

I was walking with my dogs in the field behind my house today, that my wife and I call the back forty, though it isn’t anywhere near that big. The hounds were nosing around, reading the news of the night before—the invisible trails left by deer and rabbits and geese and who knows what all—and I turned to look back at my house, and wince at how disreputable it is. There are weeds and scrub trees, and shaggy honeysuckle drooping everywhere, and I always make plans to spend a day hacking it all out, but I never do. I call our property the Radley place, after To Kill a Mockingbird.

By contrast, my next door neighbor’s property is very clean and kempt, and I don’t know how they keep it that way, as they are both young parents with busy careers and an even busier toddler. It shames me a little bit, but I try to rise above it, and lean into my laziness. They have a large deck coming off the back of the house, built by the former owners, and two massive maple trees rising just off the corners of the deck. As I looked at them, marveling at how quickly they have leafed out over these past Spring days, I flashed back to when the original owners planted them.

Ours was a new subdivision back in 2001, and their house was built the same time as our house, and they engaged in sweat equity same as us—seeding the grass, planting the trees, spreading the stones in the open crawl spaces before the houses went up over them. They were a young couple, very sweet and friendly, and we often spent time chatting in our yards. They had a St. Bernard named Birdie, who was slow and lazy and sweet ( until the day he found a nest of baby rabbits in the mulch at the base of our front yard maple, and swallowed them whole). We looked out for each other’s pets if we happened to be out for a long weekend, and even became friendly with their parents when they came to visit.

After a few years they had a baby girl, Gracie, and Dani was madly in love with her, and bought her gifts of clothes and toys, and was always happy to babysit if they had to be out for a while. The young man, whose name was Kenny, and I, would mow the back 40, which was supposed to be the job of the city, but they didn’t get around to it for the first few years of the subdivision. He worked for a construction company, and Brandi his wife worked for an insurance company. They were quiet, simple folks, doted on young Gracie, and a big date for them was to drive to Logan, about an hour south, which is where the closest Sonic was located.

Another hobby of Kenny’s was racing 4-wheelers. Apparently, there is a local track for such things , with a regular schedule of events, and he competed most weekends. This is something utterly alien to me. I know nothing about motorsports of any kind, and even less about the gear involved. I’ve never wanted a motorcycle, 4-wheeler, 3-wheeler, or anything with motors really. I own a car out of necessity, but am not bonded to it the way some people are to their cars. I have a self-propelled lawnmower, but that’s as far as my motoring goes.

But Kenny was deep in. Brandi and Gracie would attend his races, and they would recount the race to us next time we saw them. I tried to be interested, but it was just something I couldn’t connect with. I imagine they would have felt the same way listening to one of my stories about performing Shakespeare in the Park. They were niche things, our interests, but we connected best in the neighborly pursuits of lawn care and cookouts.

Late one Saturday night, our Golden Retriever Sonny started barking at the front door. This usually means someone is outside the door, but I hadn’t heard a knock. I looked through the peephole and saw Brandi standing on the porch. I opened the door and invited her in. It was apparent from the first moment that she’d been crying. She asked if we could keep Birdie, the St. Bernard for a few days. After some difficulty, she explained that Kenny flipped his 4-wheeler during a race and it had rolled over him as he lay on the track.

How bad is it, I asked.

Bad, she said.

Kenny’s family was going to take Gracie for a while, and she’d be grateful if we could watch Birdie while she was at the hospital. Of course we would.

Birdie spent the new few days with us. I brought his big pillow over from his house, and his food and toys. Sonny and Pepper (our terrier) were scandalized. Birdie settled onto his pillow in a corner of our living room, and gave out a low growl every time one of them came near him. Pepper took hint and stayed away, but Sonny, never a strong problem-solver, kept trying to get close enough for a butt sniff. Birdie would bark and snap if he got too close, but Sonny never really gave up on trying to be friendly. It was a tense few days in the house in the canine universe.

Walking Birdie was easy—you opened the back door, he padded his slow way into the yard, did immediate business, then made his slow way back into the house and his pillow. After a few days there were landmine sized poops all over our backyard.

It turns out Kenny was paralyzed from the waist down. It was a long time before he made it home. When at last he came, his employers sent some of Kenny’s co-workers over to build a wheelchair ramp into his house. They also installed railings on the walls everywhere in the house, and one of those chair lift elevator rigs to get him up and down the stairs. The company also set him up with a computer loaded with bootlegged Autocad software, so he could retrain to be a draftsman. I wish I knew the name of his company, because I would give them their props for being 100% menschs.

But for all that, it just didn’t work. It was too difficult for him to get around in that house, which is fine for the two-legged and the four-legged, not so much for the wheeled. These weren’t the wheels he was used to driving. It was sad that he was beginning to learn how not to walk the same time his daughter learning how to. Eventually, they made the decision to leave. Her family purchased some land in Union County, and financed the building of a house on it, low-slung, one story and wide rooms and halls. And ramps. They were just going to walk away from this house. It was the time of the housing crisis, so I’m pretty sure theirs wasn’t the only house their mortgage company had to eat. I remember Brandi apologizing to us, because she knew what happens to a neighboring  property when there are abandoned houses nearby. I told her that it was all good, she was doing what was best for her family, and there were no hard feelings whatsoever. I told her I would miss them.

The last time I saw them was on their moving day. Brandi and some friends were loading up a small truck with furniture and other items and driving up to Union county, and then returning for another load. It was an all day job.

That evening, while Brandi was up north, I got a call from Kenny. He asked if I could come over to his garage. When I arrived, I saw that he was parked in the front of garage doorway, holding a baseball bat. He asked if I could hang with him a little while. He said there was a pickup, with three guys in the cab, that kept cruising slowly back and forth in front of his house. They would slow to a near stop and the guys would peer into his garage, obviously casing things. What they saw was a couple thousand dollars worth of tools and table saws and such, and a lone guy in a wheelchair guarding it.

How they learned about it I don’t know. Creatures like that are feral, sharks that smelled blood in the water, circling and waiting for the best moment to strike. I ran back to my house and got my shotgun and my .38 revolver and came back to the garage. I handed Kenny the handgun and I stood beside him with my 12 gauge. The predators came by again, but this time they saw a different calculus. They saw a couple of guys who were strapped, and for all they knew, ready. They actually came to a stop for a few seconds, then continued on to the cul de sac at the end of the road, turned around and drove past again, this time fast. They disappeared down the street.

Kenny and I stayed there for a long time, waiting for the truck to come back, but it never did. To this day I don’t know why we didn’t call the cops, but it never occurred to us. In time Brandi came home, and they locked up things for the night. I went back to my house, and went to bed and lay awake till almost dawn, trembling with adrenaline.

I didn’t see Brandi and Kenny again. They were gone the next morning when I got up and went check on them. I went to work and when I returned at the end of the day, their car wasn’t in the driveway. I went on with my week and whenever I looked in on their house, I found it lifeless. Another neighbor later told me she’d see a moving company come and finish the loading.

And so they were gone to the next phase of their lives. The house remained empty for quite a few years. When I mowed, I took care of their yard as well. And always with a tinge of sadness, wondering how things were going with them. The maple trees they’d planted in the backyard grew tall pretty fast. I noticed that in the fall, one would turn bright orange and empty completely of leaves before the other started changing color. It’s something I count on every year, one tree seeming to look out for the other till it goes to sleep.

Finally, the house was bought by a young woman—her first house as an adult. She brought with her a young husky named Katya who growled whenever Sonny tried to visit. He never learned. Within a few years she married a nice guy, and a few years after that they had a little boy. We look out for each other’s pets, we’ve had dinner together at local restaurants, we chat about lawn care and politics, we’ve become friendly with her parents, and life motors on.

Sonny has since passed on, and I’m sure Birdie is long gone as well. Little Gracie would be close to college age now. I hope Brandi and Kenny are doing well in their now not-so-new home, and have built a life that suits them. I doubt they think about us much. That activity is more reserved for the elder folks in the world, who walk dogs in a small field and marvel at all the years crowding together in one space, like furniture endlessly accumulating in an old house.