It's been about a year since I last saw my neighbour Bob. I don’t know if he is working in the oil
patch and comes out only infrequently, or if he has left his wife and moved in
with some woman that has horrendous taste in men. For all that I know, he may
have left his wife and the rest of us on the planet and moved on to giving God
and the angels a hard time. He was/is a miserable prick!
The only time
that Bob ever talked to me was when he wanted something. Oh, he would talk if I
went over and looked him straight in the eye and said something like “How are
you doing Bob?” He would mumble or grunt something unintelligible in his
monosyllabic way, and I would come away feeling that we had had a meaningful
and thought provoking discussion. Well, as meaningful and thought provoking as
you can get talking to an asshole.
However, Bob and
I did talk and in our way we had some sort of relationship. His wife has never
said a word to either Louise or myself in the four or five years they have been
here. Maybe she is pissed because just after they paid $400,000 for their
house, the prices dropped and it is now worth about $300,000. It wasn’t my
fault! No, really! I started missing Bob sometime about two winters ago when
the sidewalk started to get shoveled in front of his house. Bob never shoveled,
so I have to assume that Mrs. Bob is doing the work around the house now that
he is absent.
Last fall, Mrs.
Bob had a roofing company come in and do her house and garage roof. I
speculated that maybe she was having the place spruced up so that it would be
saleable for when the inevitable divorce happened. The roof was just a start,
but nothing else was done last year and I guessed that Mrs. Bob just didn’t
want the rainwater coming into the house. A month or so ago, a big truck with a
cherry picker came in and they trimmed the trees until they looked like a bad
artists interpretation of a tree.
Just this
weekend, another truck with a bunch of men with extremely loud machines came in
and started trimming hedges and digging and raking wherever they could dig and
rake. Instead of a normal hedge trimmer, they were using this device that was
about eight feet long and had about two feet of chainsaw attached to the end. I
heard the old guy tell the younger guy that he’d show him how it worked once
and then he is on his own. I was pretty sure there would be human limbs cut off
before the day was done. Nope. Yesterday, a guy spent the day power washing the
whole property from top to bottom. I thought at the time that Mrs. Bob must be
washing Bob out of her life for good.
Today, there was
a guy that spent the better part of the day leaning on his shovel and wandering
back and forth. He started spreading black cloth all over the lawn and pegging
it down just after lunch and before my coffee. It wasn’t until mid afternoon
and after my coffee when a dumptruck loaded with woodchips (mulch) pulled up
and a couple of guys started to cover the black cloth completely. I think they
are done now, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.
I am expecting a
“FOR SALE” sign, but I suppose that it is possible Mrs. Bob just wants the
place to look nice for a change. I’ll tell you though, she has upped the ante
so that now I am going to look after my lawn and flower bed just a little better
than before. I kind of hope that there is the FOR SALE sign so that I can have
new neighbours that don’t want anything from me but are willing to have a
neighbourly chat over the fence every now and then. That would be nice…
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