Would you want me as your neighbor?

I’ve lived in the same house for the last fifteen years and I have very good neighbors. With few exceptions, they reflect my idea of what a perfect neighbor is. I sincerely hope I fit their description also. My neighbors are good as gold and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

If you are around me very much and I’m asked what exactly it is that I would like to see abiding in this subdivision, you’ve already heard the drill. I don’t hem and haw, mutter incoherent nothings, coughing and mumbling – I reply without thinking and I tell it like this:

“I don’t want no criminals or perverts living here (yes, I say it like that even though it is a double negative). I don’t care what color their skin is or secondary culture they have, as long as we share the same values. Wow! What does that mean exactly you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.

It means they put being an American citizen before past allegiances.

It means they want to raise their family in safety. It means they believe in working for a living. It means they respect the law(s). My kind of neighbor watches out for bad people in the neighborhood and alerts me and others. My kind of neighbor doesn’t want to engage in any activity that disrupts the peace of the neighborhood, including loud sounds and music.

I want to believe a good neighbor would think leaving Christmas tree lights up year round is a bad idea, or parking their car or truck in the front yard (other than to wash it occasionally). I think a good neighbor would not feel like having a pile of junk in their yard was something others would appreciate. If I was going to paint my house, I wouldn’t want a garish color that my neighbors would object to, but paint it to reflect good taste.

I want my neighbors to be friendly. They don’t have to visit, just wave occasionally and I will take that as a good sign. If they need some eggs, or a stick of butter, by all means come on down! If they have an emergency, my door is open. If they need me to mow their yard while they’re out of town, I’ll crank up the Toro and do a professional job. Heckfire, I’ll even park my car in their driveway to make it look like someone is home – no problem.

My wife is a Mater Gardener and I am a lawn maintenance junkie. I cut my yard about twice a week and routinely trim my many shrubs and trees. However, I do not hold my neighborhood to this standard (most people detest yard work and I accept it). I do like to believe a good neighbor will regard their lawn as something which can make a neighborhood look well taken care of, or run down. The same goes for the general appearance of their house and roof.

Having an overgrown uncut and unkempt yard makes a nice neighborhood look beat down and neglected. I ran a one man lawn service here in town for about 12 years and knowing our variable weather patterns, we have from March until October on any given year whereby we must attend to our yards. Once every ten days, the yard MUST be cut or it will look like it needs bush-hogged.

That’s the bare minimum. Three times a month. Anything less and you are contributing to the overall degraded appearance of a neighborhood. Throw in some untrimmed and neglected shrubbery, a couple of cars in the front yard and a 5th wheel trailer, last years Christmas lights, trash cans on the curb from three days ago, fourteen newspapers (most wet, soggy and ran over), a mailbox that is aligned at a 45 degree angle, six feet of debris stacked against the side of the house and the truck in the driveway that hasn’t ran in five years and you are the de facto trashy neighbor, like it or not.

I would really like to believe folks just don’t get it, but something tells me they just don’t care. They spend their hard-earned money to buy into a nice new subdivision and within a year of their arrival it looks like a Beirut war zone. Because some homeowners see their house as a throwaway commodity, they use it then lose it, leaving behind something resembling a third world catastrophe…and you were cursed by living next to them.

They will be the first to gripe about how ugly Baytown is and they are the reason Baytown is ugly. It beats any logic I can muster. I imagine these trashy appearing homesteads would be shocked if a big game hunter arrived at their doorstep and asked if he could run a safari in the deeper parts of their yard, or if they realized how many snakes we have in our suburbs this year due to the rainfall.

Regardless of our station in life, the hours we work, or the amount of money we bring in, keeping the appearance of our house and yard up is still the neighborly thing to do.