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Neighbors

I live in a big city, in a part of town where the blocks have a bunch of houses all bunched together. I don't mind it, but as a result of this set up, I don't really know many of my neighbors. I've seen a few of them around, and I say hello when I do. However, it's not like they know my life story and I don't know anything about their lives other than the fact that they live on my block. It's somewhat unfortunate, because we lose out on the community feel as a result. Still, there are times when I realize precisely why things are this way.

As one person put it, I have at least one "weird neighbor." Well, the neighbor on the other side of our house isn't exactly tons better. Back when we were working on the shed with a million nails, he suddenly decided that he was going to be more social. Well, actually, it's more like he draped himself over the fence between our two houses and started to inspect our work. Mind you, he did all of this while we were standing there working. Startled, I looked up, and had the following exchange:

Me: "Oh, hi. Can I help you with something?"
Neighbor: "No, nothing, just wanted to see what was going on."
Me: "Um, yeah, well, we're building this shed."
Neighbor: "Oh, that's nice."
Me: "Um, okay." (I start to turn away)
Neighbor: "So, um, when will it be done? Like two weeks?"
Me: "No, actually. Most of it should be done today."
Neighbor: "Great, great"

If he was worried about the noise, I would've at least understood his concern. I wouldn't have agreed with said concern for noise on a Saturday afternoon, but I would've understood. As it was, though, this was a thinly veiled attempt to be nosy. Great, just great.

The second run-in involved the neighbors in one of the houses behind us. Our house is on a hill of sorts, only we're near the bottom of the hill. That means that the people in the houses behind us can see in to our yard, and if I leave my curtains open, they can see in to my room. On this particular day, the sun was out, so I had purposely left the curtains open. I was also feeling a little restless, so I decided to do a few pull ups. Now, I was focused on doing pull ups, so I wasn't paying much attention to anything but that bar. However, the pull up bar faces the back yard, so I eventually noticed that there was a lady in her backyard. The thing was, she was just staring at me.

You know how sometimes you aren't paying attention and you suddenly realize that your gaze has settled on a person? It's not quite staring at someone, but it can look that way from the outside. Most people realize this, catch themselves, and then shift their gaze. Not this lady. I looked up and I realized that she was looking in my direction. I then made eye contact, and her gaze stayed locked where it was. Holy crap, she was actually staring at me. Um, great. I don't remember if I finished up or she got bored, but either way, it was a strange feeling.

Of course, none of that tops the time when my brother was over. I don't entirely remember what we had to do, but we were in the backyard working on something (I think it involved gardening). We were taking a quick break and talking, when we both noticed some movement out of the corner of our eyes. Looking over a few houses, there was some woman walking on the top of her roof. I have no idea why she was up there, but she was walking around like it was pretty normal occurrence for her. In the split second that it took us to notice her, she noticed that we had shifted our gazes. Apparently being a fairly sociable person, she smiled and waved. A split second after that, she had simply walked out of sight.

We didn't think much of the exchange, and got back to work. Hours later, though, my brother happened to mention it to his wife. She was not nearly as amused, and she wanted to know why some random woman was waving at her husband. We didn't have a good answer, but my brother did tell her not to worry. After all, he claimed to have only given her the head nod that is the universal guy symbol for "sup." More importantly, though, the story went that he'd only waved back with his ring finger, in essence waggling his wedding ring at her. He had been polite because that's how our momma raised him, but he had handled it with his wife's best interests at heart (there was quite a bit of laughter after that).

So, all in all, I'm starting to think that it's probably a good thing that I don't really know our neighbors. Otherwise, I'd deal with a whole heck of a lot more nosy oddballs, peeping Tina's, and home wreckers.

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