Dear Reader,
Are you blessed with good neighbors? Or, at least neighbors who are pleasant and keep to themselves allowing you to keep to yourself as well? Whether you live in the city, suburbs, or country, we all have neighbors. Unless you are lucky enough to live far off the grid in the middle of the woods. In which case, I envy you. I live in the city. For most of my life, with the exception of some glorious county living, I've lived in either the suburbs or the city.
There have been loud neighbors, those without boundaries, and even some grumpy ones, but no one that I would say affected my life in any detrimental way. I would often (and still do) look outside first before I picked up my garbage or collected my mail to avoid some of the aforementioned boundary lacking neighbors. After all, I am an introvert who prefers not to engage in small talk whenever possible.
Never before have I had such a mean, nasty, angry, bitter neighbor like the one I've had for the last seventeen years. This woman hates everyone, but most importantly, she hates herself. She will find anything to complain about, no matter how petty. I'm reluctant to use the term Karen for two reasons. One: I have an amazing aunt named Karen and two: I wouldn't insult an actual Karen like that, since this woman is much worse. I won't go into the details, because they are more suited to a novella than a short newsletter. But suffice it to say, at times, I dreamed about putting the family in the van and hitting the open road. For quite some time, the neighbor's vines are literally tearing down our shared fence. My husband has repeatedly fixed it on our side, but her vines, that she refuses to cut, keep coming back and continue to ruin the fence. Because you can't actually have a normal conversation with this woman, my husband just continues to fix the fence on our side whenever it needs it.