editor’s note: this is the heavily corrected version of the draft that accidentally went out via google notifications on Thursday afternoon.

Dana at Feast After Famine has a new post, “Those” neighbors.

Until recently, I thought I was a good neighbor.

I mow the grass, tend our gardens, share vegetables and flowers with neighbors, and linger on the sidewalk when people want to chat. I manage to get the trash cans back to their right spot without too much delay and I pick up our dog’s crap.

We don’t have a rusted-out El Camino on blocks on the front yard, host rowdy keggers with bonfires in the back or howl at the full moon.

You’d be happy to call us neighbors, right? Maybe not.

[Go read the rest, it’s excellent. Go on, I’ll wait here].

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll mention that Dana lives in my neighborhood, although I don’t think we’ve ever met in person.

I’ve lived here for 20 years, through many years of people complaining about how there are never kids out playing in their yards. Now there are kids and it’s a problem? Interesting.

Kids don’t bother me, that kind of noise is intermittent. For some reason I can block it out in a way I can’t block out the racket from the person who spends THREE hours EACH and EVERY fucking Saturday leafblowing their back yard from April to October. Every. Saturday. Hours. Hours and hours and hours.

But kids playing before 9 a.m.? That’s a problem for people? Really?

We do live in a small, densely populate city so I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that people get annoyed by kids playing, I simply had no idea it was, you know, an issue.

Familiarity does breed contempt.

If you’ve ever browsed a neighborhood list-serve – for any neighborhood socio-economically able to sustain a list-serve – you know that there’s a never-ending menu of things for people to get upset about when people live within, oh, say 100 miles of one another.

Maybe I should invite the kids over to play in our yard – our neighbor’s 5 foot tall water fall is so loud no one could hear them over the din. We have to close the windows when some of our friends come over because otherwise everyone is standing in line for the bathroom all night because of the overwhelming sound of running water. It got quieter last year but today when they started it back up? It was like Niagara Falls for a few hours this afternoon. It’s beautiful and it’s a small silly thing, but sometimes it does make me a little crazy. But I digress…

Actually, I take back my statement that I don’t have issues with neighborhood kids – I do have one issue. I must admit that there’s a black patch on my soul that makes me almost sort of but not really secretly wish for some arts education de-funding on that cursed day every year when every kid in the neighborhood brings home a recorder. Jesusmary&joseph on a raft, do I hate recorder day.

Other than that, I’m good.

I try to take a deep breath when the leaf-blowing starts or someone leaves the dog out to bark all day or someone screams as they go over the Neighbor Falls in a barrel and remind myself that we probably do things that annoy the neighbors too, and we all have to nod and smile and compromise just a little bit.

Plus, there are those raging parties we throw every weekend, plus the bonfires, and the howling….

I made the part about the barrel up, but you can’t prove it couldn’t happen someday. If they were very small people. In a very small barrel.

Okay, okay. I made the part up about the parties every weekend and the bonfires, too. The howling, that’s another story.

I wonder if Dana’s kids would fit in a small barrel?

I’m kidding.

Mostly.

I’m regretting that I didn’t save the box our refrigerator came in for someone’s kids. Eventually we’re going to need a new dishwasher, I’ll have to remember.

(Sarasota readers: Dana Damico is no relation to Jennifer D’Amico. I assume. I’ve never asked. I did run into Jennifer one day – in our next door neighbors back yard! Jennifer went to college with them. And one of the neighbors turned out to be a distant cousin of mine. Small strange world. That’s a post for another day).