107 - Neighborhoods Start With People

Hi everyone, it’s Lindy, and I’m glad to be back in the podcast chair today. I live on beautiful Vancouver Island, right here in Western Canada.  I am Grammy to two wonderful children who live in northern Canada, proud mom of two adult children, and partner to a man who survives me quirkiness.  Yes, I am quirky, and I believe that goes hand in hand with a creative side.  

It's Valentine’s Day, and I’m up early, thanks to Ozzie the Studio Hound.  I have a senior poodle in the house, and lately his sleep patterns are a bit off, so I’m a bit tired today.  I up twice in the night last night.  I took him on a long back trail walk yesterday and I suspect he chewed some foliage that upset his tummy a bit.  So now I’m awake and he’s fast asleep in his bed behind me.  Funny how that works.  

Last week I noted that I was looking for stories about neighbors.  I wasn’t looking for trash, or gossip, but plain old stories that might bring a smile.

I have a few to share today, and it all goes hand in in with today’s topic.  Neighbors. The good and the bad, we all have had neighbors that became part of our lives, whether or not we wanted it.  There are good neighbors, and there are challenging neighbors.  I’ve had both.

My memory of neighbors goes back a long way.  I am just a few years away from turning 60, yet my memories of childhood neighbors will always stay with me because they became lifetime friends. 
 I have a friend in Alberta, and we were childhood friends. I went to kindergarten with her brother, and their mom babysat me.  We were not “close neighbors” as in our houses being right next door, but we were close.  We lived one block away on the next street, but we are at each other’s houses often. Our moms became close friends, often providing support to each other as parents and during difficult times.  It felt like the children in their family were an extended part of our family.  The boy I went to kindergarten with was my best friend in those days.  Yes, I got his hand-me-down long-johns and we played with toy trucks and farm animals in the sand and in winter months our moms often took turns hosting all the kids for an afternoon, providing entertainment for us and a much needed break for the other mom.   They were more than neighbors, they became the family that lived on the next block over, even though we were not related by blood.  

We had another neighbor who had two boys, and they also became part of our family. Their dad was raising two boys on his own, and our mom was raising four girls on her own. Our parents were never romantically involved, they were just simply friends.  I can remember times he loaded all of us kids in his Toyota jeep and took all of us to the Dairy Queen for treats on a hot summer day.  For a single dad, I am sure it wasn’t always easy to pay for the extra kids that came along, but he did it.  As kids we  looked out for each other. I remember one day when I was a pre-teen, and mom was a work.  It was a hot summer day and I decided to crank the record player from inside the house so I could hear the music while I was out on the front lawn. Yeah, we didn’t have headphones in those days.  It was early, and I was enjoying the warmth of the sunshine on my shoulders, the smell of the dew on the grass, and the voice of Deborah Harry singing Heart of Glass echoing through the neighborhood. One of the boys from the across the street, who was a few years older, came flying across the road and said “Lindy, Lindy, what are you doing with your music so loud?”.  I said “Oh, hanging out, I love this song”.  I think I was around 10 or 11 at the time.  “You got to turn it down” he said.  “This is way too loud, and it’s do early.  You’ll get in trouble”.  “Oh,” I replied, “I had no idea you could hear it across the road”.  I looked up to Gary, and he too, was like a big brother to me in the neighborhood.  He had my back that day, and the backs of all the other neighbors who may not appreciate listening to Blondie full blast at 9 am.  I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was a kid, and in those days, older kids often helped mentor the younger kids in the neighborhood. I think Gary taught me a life lesson that day about respect for neighbors when it comes to noise.  

I had other neighbors growing up, and they lived at the top of our street.  While we had four kids in a two-bedroom house and it seemed snug at times, we were fortunate enough to have running water and full toilet facilities.  My friends up the street underneath the hill did not have bathrooms and had to use an outhouse from out back during the cold winter months.  As kids we didn’t understand why things were different.  We didn’t know that for years the families of our friends were repeatedly displaced from land they had used for centuries. We didn’t know that. It wasn’t until years later, after I had grown up and moved out, that our friend’s parents were finally able to move to a new subdivision created through negotiated agreements.  Although our own families were great neighbors, the generations before us did not even think about the word neighbor when I came to land use.  I am still friend on Facebook with these ladies, and I know 50 years later we all still feel a bond that came from growing up  in that neighborhood.

I had another neighbor down the road. She came from Mexico. I didn’t really understand how different her culture was.  I just knew she was a nice girl, and although we were very different, and she was a bit younger, riding bikes together did not require a lot of linguistics, simply a lot of smiles and knowing that we could be friends, no matter where we came from.

As I grew up and moved out, I learned with did and didn’t make a good neighbor.  The first neighborhood I moved into at the age of 17 was not a good neighborhood. I worked evening shifts in a local restaurant and a few times at night when I drove home in my car, I had people throwing rocks at my car in the dark, yelling rude profanities. It was nothing personal, just not a good neighborhood.  The rent was cheap, but the $200 a month deal was not worth the negative surroundings. I updated to a $500 a month apartment.  It’s hard to imagine those prices, but that was in the mid 1980’s. 

After that first experience on my own, I moved into a 3 story apartment building.  My apartment was on the third floor.  I moved in on a hot sunny day in July.  Up the stairs and down the stairs, packing furniture and boxes.  It was getting towards the end of a long day when I opened the door to my apartment and discovered there were people I didn’t know sitting on the couch.  I stopped in my tracks at the door, and my first instinct was “what the heck are you doing in my apartment?”  Oh my gosh, then it hit me.  That was not much couch, not my chair, and not might floor lamp.  I was in the wrong apartment. I was so embarrassed, and I likely scared the crap of out them also.  As I stood with the box in my arms, I said “I am so sorry, I’m on the wrong floor”.  They were great, and they burst out laughing and said it wasn’t the first time that had happened. I beelined it out of there and went up the next flight of stairs.  I never did get to know those neighbors under me, but from time to time we would pass in the parking lot, and they would give me a wave and I’d wave back. At that point I was just 18 years old, and I’m sure they were grateful I was not a noisy neighbor. I was working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet, and I had no time for noise.

Throughout the years I have had great relations with neighbors and met people from all walks of life.  Years ago I was at the beach with my daughter when she was around 4 years old, and it was just the two of us.  A lovely family with two little girls around the same age invited us to join them, and the girls played together and I had great chats with this couple.  It was much to our surprise when a year later this family moved in down the road from us. I remember the excitement as we said “hey, you’re the family from the beach”.  The girls became good friends throughout high school, and although I eventually moved away, there will always be a connection.  I am still in touch with the parents from time to time, even though I now live 2500 kms away.

I’ve had neighbors that did not fit the bill of good neighbors.  One time I had a neighbor who came to borrow a jigsaw from us.  He said he just needed it for a day.  It turned out he was building an entire fence, used the jigsaw for the whole thing and returned it back with a burned-out motor. He said “I guess I need to buy myself a new jigsaw because yours doesn’t work anymore” and off he went to buy a brand new one.  That’s always the hard thing with lending and borrowing, and perhaps it wasn’t his fault the motor blew.  No matter what, the tool he borrowed for a “small job” was used on a big job, and there was no offer of help to replace it.  

I had another neighbor behind me whose dog barked morning, day, noon and night.  They guy was never home, and his dog was often left outside.  I love dogs, but I don’t love dogs barking all day at the fence right behind me.  It was hard to enjoy the back yard because this thing was loudly barking at the fence all the time, and it only stopped when he was home.  I found myself getting wound up after it went on for months, because I couldn’t sleep with the windows open because this barking dog would keep everyone up.  I politely said something to him one day at the fence, and mentioned “you may not be aware but your dog is barking all the time when you are out”.  He shrugged, and said “oh, he never does it when I’m here”.  He glared at me, and I knew he thought I was being picky.  A week later the dog was no longer outside all the time, and I found out a few years later two other neighbors also talked to him about it after I did.  Barking dogs is always  a tough one because a dog is a dog and dogs bark.   It’s hard if loose dogs come up the fence because a dog inside the fence may bark to protect the property.  Sometimes it takes a bit of cooperation on both sides to make life possible for the neighborhood dog.

Speaking of neighborhood dogs, we had a really crappy neighbor when I was a kid.  There was a year when we had a neighbor with a German Shepherd dog.  The neighbor sometimes went on a bender, and one day I came home after school and his dog was loose.  I couldn’t get near our yard because the dog was pacing on the road in front of our houses, barking and snarling at me.  I had to pee so bad, it was the first year I was allowed to come home alone after school.  My sisters would be arriving soon on their bus, and I wouldn’t be alone for long.  It didn’t help that it was a cold winter day, I had to pee, and the dog wouldn’t let me near the yard. I actually went and knocked on the door of a neighbor across the road and asked for his help.  I didn’t really know him, I just knew his name was Pete and he had an accent.  Pete came out of the house, managed to get the dog by the collar and get him back in his own backyard.  It turns out the neighbor next to us, the actual dog owner, had consumed too many libations that day and was sitting in the dog house when Pete arrived.  I was forever grateful to Pete, as I was desperately trying to not pee my pants and it was cold out.  That damned loose dog had made life difficult.  I remember Mom giving me a very strong chat that day about never knocking on the door of the neighbor we don’t know.   I said I knew his name was Pete, and she chastised me strong and said “it doesn’t matter you know his name, you don’t know him”.  I remember that day feeling really upset, because the dog had scared me and now I was in trouble for enlisting the help of a neighbor I didn’t really know.   Lots of fears happened that day, for me and my mom.  None of it would have happened if that dog had not been loose.

I moved into a home in a fairly new neighborhood when my kids were small.  It wasn’t a fancy neighborhood, but the homes were newer and we were all building up our properties from scratch.  It’s a lot of work to put up a fence and landscape.  Our family had worked hard and brought in multiple truckloads of sand for an open sandpit around the kids swing set. I had slowed purchased shrubs and bushes for the yard as I could afford it.  One day I noticed cat crap in the sand area under the swingset.  I picked it up.  The next day there was more.  I cleaned it again. This continued for a while and I noticed my neighbor’s cats were constantly on the fence, jumping into the yard to do their business around the swingset. I politely mentioned it to my neighbor, and she said “oh, I’ll try to keep them away”.  It didn’t happen.  I noticed the lilac bushes were chewed up in the front, and I had just planted them earlier that summer. I was now cleaning cat crap around the lilac bushes, and the branches were getting broken with chew marks.  One morning the neighbor across the road phoned me at 7:30 am and said “look outside, you’ll find the culprit to your damaged lilacs”.  I open the front door, and both the neighbors cats were in the front garden, one chewing on the plant and the other one burying it’s poop in my garden.  Urggh.  Frustrating.  So I mentioned it again to my neighbor that her cats were making a mess in my front yard as well as the back.  She was young and a new homeowner.  She glared at me, like I was a cat-hater.  I didn’t hate cats, as I grew up with cats, but I didn’t like cats wrecking my property.   A week later I went out on my back deck.  We had that indoor-outdoor grassy looking turfy-type carpet on the upper deck. It had a strong pungent smell.  I couldn’t figure out where the smell was coming from.  It reeked.  It turns out the cats had been going up there, and one was spraying it.  This time I was not so polite.  This deck covering had cost hundreds of dollars.  My neighbor didn’t want to hear it.  She didn’t care that her cute furry felines were causing damage to things we worked hard for.  Well, it didn’t stop there. We put a sign in our front garden that was a cheeky sign, and it looked like a grave marker and had a no-pooping sign on it.  It says “here lies the last animal that shit in our garden”.  My other neighbors all laughed and thought it was a funny sign, but the cat owner didn’t.  She approached me one evening around 7 at night and asked me to remove the sign. She told me she feal threatened by it, she didn’t know what kind of people we were, and was questioning her own safety next door.  OMG – I lost it.  I had put up with cleaning up after her animals, they had destroyed things I paid for, I was a hard working young mom and it was at the end of a long day when she arrived at my doorstop to accuse me of being a danger.   My response was “first of all, your cats have caused so much damage here and you don’t give a shit because it’s not you paying for it.  Second of all, I was born and raised here and I’ve never hit anyone in my life.  You obviously don’t know me.  Third of all, I consider this accusation harassment so get the eff off my property and don’t come back. I don’t want to see you or your cats near here”.  Oh boy, I was just vibrating.  And that was it.  We lived beside each other for a few more years, and we would arrive home at night, pull in our driveways, and avoid looking at each other.  The funny thing is though, is that her cats stopped coming over.  It was around the time she put in her own garden and landscaped her yard.  After a few years, I knew she had faced some repairs to her own fence, her shingles and it must have cost her a lot of money to landscape her yard from scratch, just like us.  I didn’t like what had happened. I don’t like confrontations.  After a couple of years, I attempted to smile at her as we pulled our cards in the yard.  Eventually she smiled back, but we still went in our own houses.  One day I came out and noticed a bright yellow spider in my flowers. I had never seen a spider like that.  It was bright lemon yellow, and looked like a little crab.  I was looking at it when she pulled in the driveway. I decided to take the plunge and try to engage.  “Hey, come look at this cool spider, I have never seen anything like it”.  She walked over, crouched down and said “I think it’s a yellow crab spider.  Somes they come in on the flower trucks”.  So we began to talk about the yellow spider, and soon we were smiling, chatting and the memories of the fight over the cats disappeared.  We never brought up what happened again, and we continued to exchange pleasant words.  I honestly think she was really young when she bought her first home, and now that she had a few years under her belt, she understood the cost of homeownership.  I look back now to when we were kids, and we had cats that roamed the neighborhood. I sure hope they didn’t wreck anyone’s garden.  The funny part is now I live on Vancouver Island, and it’s prime climate for rats.  I know we have rates in the hedges because my critter cam has picked up the beady eyeballs at night.  I am actually grateful now when I see cats on the critter cam at night, because I know they are keeping the rats away.  None of these cats are a problem, and they have never wrecked my gardens.  As far as the cat incident from up north, it was  a learning experience for all of us, and I will always be grateful that at the time I moved, I was on good speaking terms with my neighbor with no ill feeling. Imagine how one little yellow crab spider provided a place for neighbors to reconcile.

When I moved to Vancouver Island, I was worried about moving to a new neighborhood.  I had lived in the Yukon for 44 years and it was my first time leaving my hometown.  Yukoners pride themselves on being friendly and welcoming, and I wondered how it would be in my new community.  I can honestly say it was great.  The day after I moved in two ladies arrived at my door, an apple pie in hand and an offer to join them on a dog walk.  Almost 14 years later and I can say that one of these ladies is considered my island family.  We no longer live in the same neighborhood, but we will always be friends, no matter where we live.  It started with an apple pie and a warm heart.

I had one neighbor who used to tie one on and sit in his hot tub singing John Denver songs at 1 am during the week.  What he didn’t realize is because a hedge bordered our house, it didn’t mean because I couldn’t see him that I couldn’t heard him.  It was frustrating when I needed to be up early for work the next day.  Once or twice a week I could live with, but when it became a regular occurrence I managed in a polite way to chat at the fence one day, and said “I love your hot tub.  Your husband has quite the singing voice”.  His wife looked at me in horror and said “You can hear him?”  I politely smiled and said “sometimes. He sure likes John Denver”.  It stopped after that.  I don’t think they really knew the sound carried so much.  The funny part is I had nicknamed him Randy Travis for a while, because he was singing Randy Travis songs in the hot tub also.  After I moved away, my friend from the neighborhood told me one day “I have Randy Travis music stuck in my head, I think someone behind your old house likes to sing at night”.  Oh boy.  The hot tub karaoke artist was at it again. 

I could go on and on, and maybe I already did, with neighbor stories, but I can’t.  I really can’t sit and yack all day in a mic.

We all have good stories and bad stories. The neighbor that was nosy and needed to know your every move vs the neighbor who simply kept an eye on your place out of genuine concern.  The needy neighbor who is constantly at your door the moment you arrive home from work vs the neighbor who respects boundaries.   There is the neighbor who likes to gossip, and they make sure they are the first one the break the news on the nitty gritty dirty of the person next door.  They often find themselves looking in when the neighborhood bbq happens, because most people don’t like to hang around a gossip.

I want to wrap this up with a cute story.  Today is Valentine’s Day, and you may recall that last year I did a podcast with JD the Flowerman.  He is back out there today, with a bus decorated by a group of high school students, his entourage of a volunteer musicians, photographers and dressed up as Comox Cupid he will go around town today, visiting schools, seniors and other locations sharing Valentine treats and making people smile.   JD shared a story with me recently, about a way he helps in his own neighbourhood.

(JD”s story here)

Thank you to the JD the Flowerman for sharing that story.

It’s time to wrap it up.  I appreciate each and every one of you taking the time to listen.  It is Valentine’s Day on the day that I am recording, and I am going to mentioned that Valentine’s Day is not just for lovers.  It’s about kindness, caring and simply being a good neighbour.

Have a great week everyone, and remember what I always say, smiles come in all languages and in all colors.  Take care!