Next Door Neighbors
A funny thing happened over twenty years time…
We moved in, and I discovered an older couple lived next door. We chatted over the fence, and I fell in love with Alice’s British accent. She and her husband were older than my parents and retired, so they spent lots of time on their boat.
Alice asked if I would watch their two goldfish for two months, so she brought over a bowl with a live plant on top. I carefully placed it on the kitchen counter, so my children could learn to love fish. One day I opened up the cupboard, where a bottle of vitamins fell and crashed onto the fishbowl, breaking the glass. The fish and the water fell to the floor.
Fish need water, I quickly reasoned, and filled a pitcher with what I hoped was room temperature water, and I took the flopping gold fish and tipped them into the pitcher of water. Needless to say, days later my kids noticed the fish listed at an angle, and I tried to tell myself they were getting better. They weren’t. I killed the neighbors’ fish.
Being kind, they understood and never asked me to watch their dog. But we bonded over photography, and I went to a talk where Alex showed his landscapes taken while boating around the Great Lakes. One day months later when I brought over some mail, Alice beckoned me to come in and we started looking through an album of Alex’s photography.
Lighthouses and seascapes gave way to topless ladies, and while I continued to turn the pages, Alice raved about her husband’s skills. I noticed the ladies were fully nude a few pages later, and Alice laughed at the twins, remarking that one had larger breasts than her sister.
Wanting to be as cosmopolitan as possible, I oohed and ahed over the naked women. Alice pointed out in one frame our friend’s stool had been used for the shot, and she bade me not to tell Linda that a nude lady perched on her kitchen stool. After an hour or so I went home and told my husband about the photos, and he just wanted to know how he could be invited over to look at the nude photos.
A few years later Alice told me her husband would love to take my daughter’s senior pictures for us, and I had a flash of seeing my daughter being asked to take off her top, so I said we’d already lined up the studio all the kids at school used for their photos. Alice took it all in stride.
She took it in stride when I asked if she could move her gonging wind “chimes” to the other side of her house. They reminded her of a dinghy they’d hear from their boat, and it had to have deafened them. That thing made so much noise in the slightest breeze, so when they said they were leaving for the summer, I sent my nine year old over the fence to take down those wind “gongs”.
Joey made it back over the fence, and I asked her how it went. “Well, it was fine. I took down the wind chimes, like you said, and put them on their deck. Except Alice and Alex looked at me funny from their kitchen.” They were home? They were supposed to be on the boat! “Mom, they were in their house, and they just watched me.” I’ll bet they did. We never said a thing about it, as they left the next morning, and I learned to love the gonging after that summer.
That’s the beauty of being neighbors. We wound up being friends, and even when they told me my two year old son had a speech impediment, because they couldn’t understand him, I took it in stride thinking precious few people understood any of my kids at that age. And so I simply smiled and nodded.
That’s what neighbors do. We watch out for each other, we try to keep their pets alive, ask each other over for coffee, and comment politely on our hobbies. Now that I moved several streets over, we miss each other and meet in my backyard (during the pandemic) or at Starbucks.
They have been to my children’s weddings. I think they’re the best next door neighbors I could have ever had. I wonder that they say about me, but I won’t think about it overly long. There’s still the fish I owe them.
