Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Sunday being Mother's Day, I decided to go spend the day with my parents. I haven't been down to the house in two to three months, which is really freaking sad considering it's maybe 45 minutes away. I am a horrible person and a terrible son.
As I pulled into the driveway, I noticed something odd. There was something different about the house next door--scary different. It started with grass three feet high, which gave me the eerie sensation that I must have arrived at the wrong house--a house that looked like my parents' but was located in some sort of... um... I can't even come up with a phase to put here that isn't offensive to someone.
I found this somewhat sad, as the old lady who'd lived there for as long as I've been alive had taken pretty good care of the place. Of course, a few months ago, mom and dad told me that she'd moved in with one of her kids, and some other family had bought the house. Which is how we get from "nice house" to "there's a car on concrete blocks, and I hear banjos." (Well, there wasn't actually a car at the house, but you know what I mean.)
It's a jungle out there
Apparently, this family that had bought the house had, as my parents described it, R-U-N-N-O-F-T. Dad had seen a truck driving away with a couple of mattresses in it, and that was that--no trace of anyone since then.
So, the house sat empty, and the grass grew. But the tall grass wasn't what made this sad--it was merely the canvas upon which this vision of redneck horror was haphazardly splattered.
For one, the residents had left a very large dog cage where their weimaraners lived. I say "cage" rather than "pen" or "house" because this thing was about three-fourths the height of the house.
Well, OK, maybe I'm exaggerating, but it was large, and it was chain link, and it had a roof. It could fit at least two of those little plastic dome-shaped dog houses. And it was inexplicably surviving being swallowed up by the ever-encroaching grass jungle.
But that wasn't all.
No, the crowing achievement of these neighbors was even better than this. Their pièce-de-résistance was a half-constructed fence. And when I say "fence," I'm not talking the white picket variety. I'm not even talking the chain link variety. I'm talking the metal posts you'd get at the Co-Op and use to string up barbed wire. But note that no fence had actually been put up, just the metal posts.
Now, please understand that even though we're talking about a small town in east Tennessee here, this isn't out in the boonies. My parents have less than one acre, so I grew up with a yard, not a farm. And I should add it's about a mile away from downtown.
So anyway, let's think about what these neighbors did. They bought at least 27 of these metal posts (which dad says cost about $3 each, so do the math). Then they stuck them up around a quarter of the yard with the intention of finishing later. Then, for some reason, they decided to leave without a trace.
I believe dad's uncharacteristically charitable explanation was that maybe they were used to renting, where they could just pick up and leave whenever they felt like it. That's nice, but I'm thinking there's got to be more to a family buying an $80,000 house and then disappearing. I dare not guess what the inside of the house looks like, but for future reference, I'm going to call this right now: they're going to find a meth lab in the basement of that house. Place your bets now.
OK, that's a bit harsh, but we are talking east Tennessee, where cooking meth seems to be the national pastime. Should that fail to be the case, my alternate theory is that they're paranoid redneck conspiracy theorists, and the fillings that the government put in their teeth were telling them that the apocalypse is coming.
My alternate alternate theory (the one that still holds out hope for humanity, although slight) is that this is some overly complex piece of performance art. In a few months, we'll have a bunch of snooty people with more self-importance than sense driving by the house to ooh and aah, when they could just as easily drive a few blocks down and see the same thing naturally-formed.
Anyway, dad, being semi-retired-slash-unemployed and apparently needing a hobby, is going to figure out who he needs to contact to get someone to do something about this mess. He's already decided that if they foreclose and auction off the property, he's going to put in a bid (low, considering the value of the house), fix it up, and double-to-triple his money. We'll see.
For now, the yard makes me sad. So sad that, were I not incredibly lazy, I might almost be motivated to mow it myself for free. But, unfortunately, I am incredibly lazy.
So we'll see what comes of this. I'm sure the mortgage company will be looking for our good friends. And the city will probably be sending a nasty letter that no one will be there to receive.
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