About two years ago we moved into a new, bigger house. What a beautiful area! Nice lawns, quiet neighborhood, large oak trees. Ah, such a life.

One day, shortly after moving in, I was hanging my new drapes in our second floor master bedroom. (I’d never had drapes in a bedroom before; I never had a master anything before so this was a big deal for me). I was taking in the lovely view of the September orange-colored leaves on the trees in our backyard. I think I remember birds chirping. Suddenly I was able to get a good view of our next door neighbor’s backyard. Gasp! That’s when I saw it; a bathtub. A white bathtub was in their backyard not even trying to be camouflaged by branches and leaves. They also had an orange cone from a road site, and a large square piece of plywood with a crudely drawn target on it. Uh oh, what’s going on?

To make matters worse, they have a reddish colored “junkyard” dog that I’ll call Libby who just kept coming into both our front and backyards relieving her bladder and bowels anywhere and at any time. She chased cars, tore across our front lawn to do so, and barked at anybody who passed by their house on foot or by bike. She’d chase bikes, too. One neighbor told me she chased someone rolling by in a wheel chair and bit them!

At Libby’s dinnertime one evening I watched her owners open their front door and scrape the scraps from a dinner plate onto their front lawn (they actually flung the food from the plate) and poor Libby ran over to eat it. Ick! Of the two houses we could have made an offer on, I freaked out that we picked the wrong one. And speaking of lawns, oh! they didn’t rake, or clean-up, or anything. They barely cut the grass. Don’t get me started on the garbage cans.

We then discovered their Goth son. To this day I still don’t know what his name is, but he only wore black. Two years later and he still only wears black. It was creeping me out. In addition, he’s in a garage band; his garage, to be exact and they practice quite a bit. At least, he does. And guess what instrument he plays? Why of course, the drums. So not only do we have a junkyard dog relieving herself in our yard, we now have Bam Bam living next door, practicing drum solos into the evening. My head was spinning.

I’ve since learned that the forty-something year old dad is a single father raising about three kids on his own because his wife left them and the dog. Now, why would a woman leave? It was like shooting fish in a barrel, but what else could I think? Most statistics state how the fathers leave, not the mothers; I don’t write the statistics, I just read them.

To keep my cool (okay, I was more lukewarm) I consulted my handy Feng-Shui books on keeping the “bad” energy away from my house. But it didn’t work. Not one iota. Why? Because they didn’t have bad energy. They were simply folks who were kinda odd. That’s all they were. Kind of odd. Not the Munsters, not the Addams family, just harmless odd ducks.

You know there’s a lesson in here somewhere, and here it is: In the two years we’ve lived here, they haven’t actually bothered us. During this time we adopted a puppy that is now 1½ years old, and he is in love, absolute love with Libby. Whatya know? The best part is that tonight they’re having a large graduation party for the daughter and the father let us know about it ahead of time – he didn’t have to tell us a thing. Besides, the band is really good. They’re playing classic rock tunes, which is fine by me. It could be worse.

As of this writing, our dog is out there staring at the love of his life while I’m tapping my foot to the drums. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?