Cue the Banjo Again

I wrote about the neighbors about a year ago in a piece called Cue the Banjo. Nothing has changed. It's actually gotten even more comic and sad. The yard continues to be a mess and overgrown with very tall weeds around a garage that is falling apart. They bought a nice lawn umbrella for the table in the very back of the yard but they leave it up and open all the time and no big surprise that very quickly it got a hole torn in it during a storm. Well, like everything else they ignore it. One of the grandchildren will occasionally now close the umbrella but of course the damage is done.

It is sadly comic that they are so proud of the handful of good plants they have in their garden. They go around and take pictures of specific plants and flowers and totally ignore all the surrounding weeds that threaten to overwhelm everything nearby. And these are very big weeds that are nearly six feet tall.

All summer long the clothes line has once again become so slack that the clothes inevitably sag and drag in the dirt long before getting near to being dry. You could count on the drag and dry within minutes. They use a couple of clothes line poles but the poles always seem to fall away. They could always retie the clothes line to the house or garage and tighten it up but that never seems to occur to them.

Someone, I think it was the son visiting from out of town, bought them a hose nozzle to water the handful of flowers among the garden weed patch. It didn't change their watering habits. They still leave the hose laying on the ground for hours with the nozzle spewing water and creating very large puddles and sometimes they prop up the nozzle on a chair aimed at a particular plant and leave it spraying that plant for hours. It's all very weird.

The yard and garage is still filled with rats. I sit out in the backyard or in my sunroom in the evening and see them running around in and out of their yard. They realized they had a problem and got a cat which hangs around outside. The cat is a hunter but I've only seen him get a bird or baby bunny. Never a rat.

The past few days the son has been in town to paint the back of their house. Several years ago, but probably five or six or more years, someone owed her money so she took it out in trade which really seems to be the only way any work gets done on their property. This person painted about a third of the back of the house. The son was here to finish it but only got about half way done before hurting his arm and giving up. Well, at least there is primer on the rest of the back of the house but the sides are still awful. The house looked like it desperately needed a paint job back when we moved nearby twenty four years ago and it hasn't happened yet. The top porch was falling apart and the daughter and her family upstairs have been able to use it for anything other than catching a cigarette on the step of the door. Going anyway out on the porch was seriously dangerous.

Someone was working on it this summer. Probably in exchange for some legal work but he did a really shoddy job. The porch is still dangerous. Pathetic.

She recently planted a big milkweed under a tree next to the street. She's been watering it from a water can every day but it looks really bad and ready to die. It looks like something from the final day of burning man.

Why do I pay attention? I sit on my porch and I see it. I sit in my backyard and I see it. I sit at my kitchen table and look out the window and I see it. And then there's that stench I wrote about earlier that keeps grabbing my attention.