Please won't you be my neighbor

I saw my ex-neighbor the other day. He was checking on his house that is back up for sale.

Somehow they got rid of the tenants who were leasing the house until next January. Well, they scared the tenants away – although I’m sure it wasn’t too difficult to get the tenants to leave since I heard that there were problems with the house (surprise, surprise).

When Josh and Katie (the tenants) came to tell me they were moving about a month back, I said, “The Mom was too much, wasn’t she.” They replied, “You don’t know the half of it. Plus we didn’t have any hot water in the kitchen and other stuff like that.”

“No hot water in the kitchen?! Why not? What did you do for hot water?”

“There was a leak in the hot water pipe, so they just capped it off instead of fixing it. We got hot water from the bathroom.”

Nice. I wonder how they washed their dishes?

Back to my ex-neighbor. There he stood shoeless and shirtless scratching his big hairy belly. Since his kids were down for the weekend, I asked if his daughter could hang out with us for a while. Then I made polite conversation.

“Hey, how are you doing?” I asked cordially.

“Good, good. I was thinking of moving back into my house, but now I’m thinking about moving to Nevada or Arizona.”

“Great idea! That sounds like fun,” I tried not to sound too excited.

“You look great. Really good.”

“Uhh…thanks. Well gotta be going. I’ll have your daughter back by noon.”

Of course when I went by his mother’s house later (which is where he lives), no one was home. And as the day stretched into the night, I finally had the daughter call again to see if her dad could pick her up.

“Well, I’ll have to call my grandma to see if she can pick me up. My dad can’t drive ‘cause if he gets caught by the police he’ll get arrested.”

“Why?” I asked

“He has too many tickets.”

“Wait a minute…then why was your dad driving this morning?”

“Uh, I don’t know.”

Eventually grandma came in her PT Cruiser to pick up her granddaughter – sans T-bone (remember the ancient free-range Rottweiler that tagged my lawn as his pooping place?). Ding, dong, the dog is dead!

No word yet regarding if the cross-country move will actually take place. But I'm eagerly seeking prospective buyers for the vacant house next door.