Love Thy Neighbor

The house next door has a for sale sign in the yard. Again. Not that it's been up for sale often, just recently. The current owners have been there just over a year. My longer term memory remains mostly intact and I recall in the twenty-two years that I've been in this house, there have been four neighbors to the east. When I moved into this house as a newlywed, there was a single man living next door and was there for only a few months. My husband knew him but I don't recall ever officially meeting him. Don't even remember a name. Then Lyle bought the house and lived there for ten or so years. He was a single guy when he moved in, got married before he moved out, and made considerable improvements on the property. He added an attached garage, a sunporch addition with a hot tub, and covered the brown painted exterior with pale yellow vinyl siding. They were good neighbors. Quiet, cooperated on yard projects and snow removal efforts. When they moved out, Larry took up residence. He wasn't there much, he continued to mostly live in Minneapolis. He was CFO of a local company and was next door when he wasn't doing his job at the home office. He didn't like apartments or hotels, he preferred the house as his home away from primary home. One of the first things Larry did was ditch the hot tub from the Lyle era and install a much larger one as well as a sauna-for-two in the sun porch. He also broke out the end of his driveway and had a much gentler angle toward the street poured in its place. Thus eliminating the annoyance of having his Corvette bottom out in the gutter whenever he backed into the street. Since Larry wasn't there all that much, there were often others in residence. For several months a crew of construction workers lived there while they were working on a building expansion for Larry's company. For a while a Spanish speaking family with a couple of small children lived there. That was during the scandal of Larry's company importing a number of workers from its Texas facility to cover an increase in production that couldn't be filled with local labor. Brookings has a perennial problem of not having a large enough labor pool, unemployment is very low and unfortunately many of the jobs that need filling don't pay well enough for families to move here. Then there was the winter that Larry's grown son lived in the house purportedly to attend college classes. Mostly we just noticed that he sat outside smoking. Then, just over a year ago a young married couple moved in. Sad to say, I don't really know them at all. I do know that they have had a baby while living there and have two completely irritating mop-shaped little dogs who bark in the most bothersome triad. Arf-arf-arf, arf-arf-arf in a descending dissonant cacophony that is particularly annoying at six-thirty in the morning. A couple of weeks ago I noticed the realtor's sign in the front yard. And I've been thinking that it would be great fun if a single guy was to move in next door. A cute single heterosexual guy. In my age range. Who, if he can qualify for a mortgage in the current economic downturn, probably has a job! I've often thought that having a boyfriend right next door would be convenient and cozy if things work out. Giving a whole new connotation to love thy neighbor.