Cue The Banjo

Neighbors. Fascinating entertainment in a bizarre dysfunctional way. Fortunately two doors away but still close enough to observe the craziness.

They have a somewhat carefully tended garden made up of weeds. Really weeds. Mostly ragweed and golden rod. Stuff you normally see on the side of a road. Lately the daughter has been spending a lot of time taking care of the weeds.

For years now I’ve watched them water their “garden” with a hose. They have never had a nozzle on the end of the hose. They always used their thumb on the end of the hose to “spray” the weeds. Sometimes they would just drop the hose and let the water just run into the yard and walk away. The water often ran like that for days and a huge lake would form in the backyard. We have lots of nozzles and I've often thought of throwing one of our nozzles over the fence some night for them to find and use in the morning but I'm sure my nozzle in their yard would sit where it lay for years and maybe damage their little blunt hand mower.

The garage is falling apart. It is filled with junk and rats. They always leave the door open and all sorts of varmints wander in. Most of the windows are broken and you can see birds actually fly into the garage through the windows. The roof is collapsing and there are gaping holes where you can see families of squirrles running in and out all day.

When the grandkids have gone into the garage to get something they often come running out screaming about the rats. The concrete driveway leading up to the garage is cracked and big weed stand six feet tall. They don’t seem to care.

They have a clothes line running from the garage to the house. The line droops. Seriously. They have one pole but it doesn’t help much. The clothes and sheets on the line almost always end up scrapping the ground. We refer to it as drag and dry. Almost every single time they hang something up it ends up on the ground. They also always seem to know when it’s going to rain because they mostly hang up things are the line right before a rainstorm. Then they leave the wet clothes on the line, dragging in the mud, for several days. The weird thing is to see them walk past the downed clothes line and do nothing about it. 

The daughter especially walks past all the chaos everyday on her way to the several cigarettes she smokes back behind the garage one after the other. I can smell her smoking while sitting in our kitchen. Disgusting. So today the daughter walked by the laundry dragging on the ground and actually picked it up and then to my amazement retied the clothes line tighter between the house and the garage. I thought it was a miracle. A new leaf. Unfortunately within the hour the clothesline was back with the slack and dragging clothes in the dirt. Oh well, cue the banjo.

This rant could go over for several pages but I’ll stop for now. It’s definitely multipart. I should take a picture.

The title is a joke with another neighbor.