Prolonging the Magic

It's Thanksgiving Eve and the trees and shrubs in our yard still have half of their leaves on them. Some of the leaves are still green. I'm almost too freaked out to enjoy it.

Who knows how long it will keep up? In all the previous years we have lived here the leaves on the shrubbery between our house and our neighbors behind are gone right after Halloween, leaving us with no protective shield between us and them. Almost the entire back of our house is huge picture windows. Theirs is the same.

In the winter time we are all up in each others business, visually.

We are clinging to our privacy for all it's worth by walking around in our underwear a little more often than we normally would do.

I can't help but wonder if our neighbors are doing the same.

My vote? Probably not.

They don't strike me as the kind of people who give a shit what the neighbors are up to as long as it doesn't involve property lines and barking dogs in the middle of the night. Certainly they are not the kind of people who create imaginary underwear wearing contests with their hermit neighbors.

They are a couple who appear to be about our same age or younger with no children and a very old black Chow-Chow that doesn't bark. We have seen the man-husband practicing his putt while sporting a jacket with a logo for a competing soft drink company than the one that MDH works for. That by itself is enough to make us avoid them.

They do seem really nice and sometimes I hear them in the warmer months in their backyard when they have parties and barbecues. Based on their 1992 Top Forty type of musical selections at these parties MDH and I have decided that other than not having children, we have nothing in common with these people and we will do everything in our power to avoid meeting them. Forever.

I think that we are just not nice people.

Enjoy the picture above of me back about 35 years ago when I was a little more neighborly. That's me (squinting and dressed for a snowstorm) and and my next door neighbor Mrs. French who I thought was the most beautiful old lady ever.

She smelled like pineapples and Ben Gay and showed me how to grow my own avocado by sticking toothpicks in the pit and suspending it in a glass of water in the kitchen window. I wasn't really sure what an avocado was, but I liked the idea of turning garbage into a fruit you could eat.