A long time ago I lived in north Georgia. My parents bought a split level house with no air conditioning when my father transferred from the Wisconsin Kimberly-Clark facility to the one in Atlanta.
Now, the summers in Georgia are both hot and humid. So, years and years after we bought the house my parents finally capitulated to the needs of humans and had an air conditioner installed, and then an alarm system (to make my very paranoid (and possibly insane) mother feel safe when my father traveled).
The air conditioner always wound up with mold growing in it and my mother would invariably set off the alarm when she got up at 5:30 in the morning to let the cats out.
I hated that alarm.
All of us did, except for my mother.
But, there was that one day when it went off for no reason we could determine when none of us had been home, so perhaps it kept us from being robbed after all. I'll cling to that hope in order to banish the childhood embarrassment of knowing all the neighbors were being woken up far too early every morning by my mother.
Now, my parents had latched onto the idea that it would be good for me to earn money. So I mowed lawns. I was more interested in sitting in front of the television than mowing lawns, so it was mostly a matter of my parents telling me to go over to some neighbor's house and my mowing the lawn when I got there than any act of entrepreneurship of my own.
After a time a family moved into the house across the street from us. I was maybe in 6th grade and living in the south, where attitudes between children and adults tended to be a bit more traditional, so I didn't tend to notice many things about adults. So, when I tell you that the pair that moved in across the street were fat and ugly in a strange creepy sort of way, I'd like you to assume that I'm being quite accurate and probably being rather kind to them.
So life went on, and we had an agreement where they'd pay me for mowing their lawn and I wouldn't think that they were too weird for covering up their front window so that nobody could see in or out.
Now this rather unpleasant looking couple (who planted these scraggly rose bushes in their front yard in this long line that made it a royal pain to mow their yard) managed to defy natural order by producing a girl who was very cute. Like, little-girl cute. She was half my age and while I was an early bloomer in certain respects, I've never been one to go for a younger sister much less attempt to rob the cradle. My interest in her largely consisted of amazement that she could've come from such parents and a passing interest in the fact that her parents had given her a little black kitten to play with.
Only, their little girl wasn't very responsible, and we noticed in a passing sort of way that the kitten was scraggly and left outside a lot when maybe it wasn't the best idea to have a scraggly little black kitten left outside. Then one day we were unloading groceries from our car and the kitten leaped into the back and dragged away a 6 pack of the yogurt cups that my mom was rather fond of.
The kitten was starving to death. And pregnant. We gave the kitten food and I can only assume that when she disappeared a few days later it was because my mother quietly took her to an animal shelter where she'd have a shot at living for more than another month.
Now, when this happened it had been a while since I'd mowed the lawn across the street, and I began to notice that the neighbors never seemed to be home anymore. They had trash sitting out back, but it never moved. Leaves accumulated and blew away with the wind (not too many leaves though, most of the trees around us had pine needles), but nobody went in or out. About this time my parents decided that they needed to move back north so we started trying to sell the house. My mother ordered me across the street to mow the neighbor's lawn so that people wouldn't be freaked out by the foot high grass growing there.
It annoyed me that I had to mow both the neighbor's lawn and our lawn without being paid, but at the same time while I was edging around those scraggly rose bushes I kept wondering over and over again what happened to the people in the house. Did they all die in a car wreck? Were they evicted? Or maybe (in the wild imagination of my childhood) they were all dead behind that big picture window that they'd covered so nobody could see in or out of. Corpses turning to skeletons and nobody would notice for a very long time because my parents were making it look like someone lived in the house across the street.
Silly, really.
But not that much stranger than having everyone die in a car wreck and then not having any relatives come and sell off your house when you were gone.
So, every once in a while I think back and wonder what happened to them.
Posted by matt at December 16, 2003 02:51 AM