We have neighbors. Some are close by, and we hang with them. Others we can’t even see, and it takes over five minutes to walk to their house. Recently the sign to the left appeared across from our house. Many of the pictures that are on this site came from walks that I took on the other side of that sign. I am not exactly sure what I did (ok, maybe I do), but it has landed me in the “bad list” with our far-away neighbor. I will call him The Old Man. I think that if I had just been intimidated like he wanted, I would still be on the “ignore list”. Unfortunately, I asked him why he was being a bad neighbor, and I guess you don’t ask a bad neighbor that kind of thing. The land that is now off limits is an island that has been turned into a peninsula, and an upscale subdivision. There are deed restrictions, and it was sold as a future gated community. The Old Man is making sure that the gates are indeed put up. In order to build there your house must be huge, your garage must fit 3 cars, etc. etc. The houses that are out there sold for over 500K in an area where 250K is high. There are only 2 houses, but they are lake front properties. Unfortunately the lake front is full of stumps from the way the lake was made a hundred years ago. This little city is a blue collar hunting and manufacturing town, so there is not much in the way of upscale development. Real estate in general is doing badly, especially here in Michigan. So the end result is that we have neighbors who bought a nice house in a lousy place, and there is little they can do to change that, except control every little detail they can. Oh, and he can.
As frustrating as it is to be living near someone who treats the neighborhood as filth, I can’t help but pity him. He’s stuck, probably in debt, and since he can’t change where he lives, he will just do everything in his power to make sure we know he is better than us, and that he thinks he has something we wish we had. He would not believe the truth.
It probably does not help that this is what he sees when he pulls out of his private-no-trespassing-no-parking-tow-away-at-owners-expense drive every day:
I guess I am not that motivated to find another place to keep the boat.
Retorts