I have some of the best neighbors ever but, like me, they all have their quirks and, like me, with quirks come small annoyances.
One woman, in particular, is the Quirk Queen of the neighborhood. Sprocket is a wonderful person, but is extremely eccentric. When she is deep in thought, you could drive your car, filled with whooping teenagers, through her garage and out the other end, turn around and plow back through her family room and she'd never take her eyes off of the TV.
A couple of summers ago, Sprocket decided to replace her old patio with a new brick design. After that was finished, she commenced landscaping. She ordered a truckload of dirt and had it dumped between our house and hers. This would have been ok, except for the fact that no work started on the landscaping for at least a month. And the truckload of dirt sat there on our grass. "It's going to kill the grass," I said to Druck. He told me it'd be fine and not to worry about it. So I didn't.
Meanwhile, time went on and it came to pass that Sprocket needed to mow her lawn. In order to get from her front lawn to the back, she would have to go through/over the massive dirt pile. Instead, as I sat in the living room, I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw her crossing over our front lawn with her lawn mower, blades going, engine blaring. She made a beeline down the other side of our house, through our backyard to hers. There was, what one would call, a path of destruction where her mower left it's mark. I called Druck at work and told him what had happened and that we now had a path from her yard, through our front yard and around to the back. He told me it'd be fine and not to worry about it. So I didn't.
An hour later, Druck walks into the house and, just as we begin to discuss the day, we hear what sounds like a speedboat coming around the side of our house and see Sprocket making her exit back over our front yard, creating yet another path. Druck, being a fairly tolerant man, goes to the window, shakes his head and says, "What is she doing?" "Don't worry about it," I snort.
"That's it," he exclaims and disappears into the garage. I wait several minutes and then go outside to see him shoveling a path through the dirt pile for Sprocket's next lawn mowing foray. Afterward, he shows Sprocket her new ingress to the backyard for future grass mowings.
By the time landscape work began, foot high weeds had taken hold of the massive dirt pile and, when the dirt was finally hauled off of the grass, there wasn't any grass left. "I'll reseed the area," Sprocket said with a wave of her hand. The patch was never reseeded, not by Sprocket and not by Druck and where the once mountainous pile of dirt stood sits a mangy mixture of cracked earth and weeds.



Copyright 2008 liamsgrandma