not making an effort

We are not very neighborly. No, not at all. We aren’t intentionally uncordial, but we’re also not overly friendly. True, we take a baggie with us when walking Tucker, but nothing else we do is too courteous. Well, I did give our next door neighbor her pick of hydrangeas, but only after she bitched about them hanging over the fence. Whatever.

Our neighbors are old – either retired or should be. The only people even close to our age on this block are the kids that still live with their parents even though those wings should have been spread long ago. Steve was asked by a door-to-door salesman if the man of the house was home recently, so apparently we look much too young to fit in. Much different from the apartments we lived in – here, ambulances come for heart attacks, not alcohol poisoning.

This is why I wasn’t all too surprised a couple weeks ago when a flyer was shoved into our storm door handle. The flyer asked everyone to put outdoor lights on the house and make 158th the brightest street on the block (sorry for the lack of a visual – I asked Steve to save it so I could take a picture of it for my blog, but apparently my blog is at the bottom of his priority list, and throwing out clutter is at the top).

We didn’t. We didn’t even throw one of those lazy nets of lights over a bush. My excuse is this: our house is a double decker – it’s two stories tall. There is no way to hang lights on the eaves without risking a broken neck. And with Steve’s clumsiness and my terrible hand-eye coordination, that indisputably would have been the end result. Yes, I realize we could have strung lights around a couple shrubs. You don’t need to mention it. That is destroying my reasoning for not participating in this social convention. So now, one week after being the only ones to not shovel our portion of the sidewalk in a snow storm, our neighbors have yet another reason to hate us.

Oh well, we can always hope for the best when this neighborhood turns. And I keep telling Steve it will soon. Soon there will be a new batch of neighbors who know nothing of our past indiscretions. And hopefully a few people we can sit on the back porch and crack open a beer with.